Why Northern biscuits suck

[gfweb]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/11/better-biscuits-south-thanksgiving/576526/

 

Is there truth in this?

[btbyrd]

I'm going to call bullshit on this. It reads like sponsored content for White Lily flour, and makes it seem as though that's the only suitable low-gluten flour available anywhere. It's not.

[FeChef]

Why not just make your own "self rising" flour with as btbyrd mentioned, "low gluten" flour.

[heidih]

I think biscuits are often about a "light hand".  I remember ? the woman who showed Vivian Howard how things should be done per HER mama and it was this deft hand with generic ingredients. 

Edited November 23, 2018 by heidih (log)

[Thanks for the Crepes]

White Lily is good. Really good for cakes, biscuits and pie crust. It's available everywhere down here. Also, I swear I did read somewhere that even all purpose flour commonly sold down here usually has less gluten than up North. I am damned if I can find that now, though. I did find this from the Washington Post. 

 

And yeah, you want to blend your low gluten flour really well with the fat, but leave some pea-sized large lumps, before adding any liquid.

 

I would love for @Ann_Tto weigh in here, because the Queen of Breads has posted some of the flakiest and most delectable-looking biscuits in the known world!

[Martin Fisher]

"The crux of this problem is a brand called White Lily, whose name and logo is familiar to virtually all southerners but foreign to most people outside the region."

What a bullshit article!!!

I live in semi-rural upstate New York.

It's a depressed and depressing area! LOL

There isn't much here!

I can buy all the White Lily flour I'd ever want, if I did want it, just 2 miles away!

OMG! Many decades before White Lily flour was known here, my paternal grandmother was baking EXCELLENT biscuits from soft wheat flour in the mountains of north-central Pennsylvania!!!

I can remember my grand-aunt, who was an excellent cook and baker in her own right, saying that nobody could make a biscuit, pancake or pie crust as well or as good as Luella—my grandmother!

It's NOT just a Southern thing!!!

 

 

Edited November 23, 2018 by DiggingDogFarm (log)

[Lisa Shock]

The author's recipe wasn't very good. Yes, proper flour is important, but the other ingredients have functionality also. IMO, butter will always make tastier baked goods than shortening. Shortening does add some softness, but I tend to choose flavor over texture. And, shortening is a modern ingredient -I would never consider this factory-made industrial product from 1911 to be 'traditional'. Lard was originally the prevalent fat in the US South. Butter tends to be found in more northerly climes, or as a Winter holiday treat due to a lack of refrigeration. This is why there is such a huge tradition of holiday cookie making: in many places, it was too warm in the summers to reliably make and keep butter.

 

Yes, good biscuits take some time to learn to make. A light hand is essential. But, I've had good ones all over. I agree this is a sockpuppet advertisement for the flour.

 

Then, there's the author's technique to consider. There are essentially two types of biscuit now, old-fashioned biscuits and drop biscuits -popularized following the introduction of commercial baking powder in the mid-1800s. Drop biscuits like his are speedy to make, but never have the lightly-laminated character of true old-fashioned biscuits. They're always kind of like tough little cakes. In culinary school, we learned to make them with butter, roughly cutting it into the dry ingredients (cake flour, baking powder, salt) then adding buttermilk, and gently forming the shaggy mass which is then gently, gingerly, folded a few times to make layers. I had previously made James Beard's family cook, Let's, cream biscuit recipe but, found the laminated sort to be superior.

 

One other note, it truly kills me to say this, but, in a past episode of Beat Bobby Flay, he went up against a Southern restaurant owner in a biscuit competition. He made the lightly-laminated culinary school sort, she made the drop type. He won.

[Martin Fisher]

5 minutes ago, Lisa Shock said:

They're always kind of like tough little cakes.

 

That's interesting.

My mother and maternal grandmother made lots of drop biscuits—very frequently.

I've literally eaten thousands of them.

I've never experienced one even remotely like that.

They were always VERY tender and 'fluffy.'

My mom still makes them.

[Lisa Shock]

8 minutes ago, DiggingDogFarm said:

 

That's interesting.

My mother and maternal grandmother made lots of drop biscuits—very frequently.

I've literally eaten thousands of them.

I've never experienced one even remotely like that.

They were always VERY tender and 'fluffy.'

My mom still makes them.

 

Sorry, I was using technical jargon. They are tougher (pastry chef slang for have more structure) than cake. Not that a person eating one would think of it as being actually tough. They need to have structure. If they were as soft as cake interior they would be difficult to split, butter, and eat out of hand.

Edited November 23, 2018 by Lisa Shock (log)

[andiesenji]

Whit Lily flour is NOT what it was 30 years ago!  When Smuckers bought the company they moved production from Tennessee where it was milled a certain way and and changed the method and the flour changed a lot.

I used White Lily and had for decades and I noticed the difference.

 

I use King Arthur self-rising flour which is now fairly easy to find and is very good.  However my FAVORITE self-raising flour, which is better than King Arthur, but more expensive, is ODLUMS which is an Irish product and is Odlums "CREAM" flour with the ingredients that make it self-raising.

 

I happened to make biscuits today - a very simple recipe.  One cup of heavy cream, 2 cups of King Arthur self-rising flour.  I use a Danish dough whist to mix because it blends the ingredients more rapidly with less working of the dough. Which is very important to keep the biscuits from being tough.

If you use heavy cream, you don't have to cut butter into the dry ingredients because the heavy cream contains enough fat to replace the butter.

These have a natural "split" area because I pat the dough even, roll it out to about 1/2 inch thick, fold it in half and roll lightly so it is 3/4" thick, cut and bake.

 

 

[Tri2Cook]

3 hours ago, andiesenji said:

If you use heavy cream, you don't have to cut butter into the dry ingredients because the heavy cream contains enough fat to replace the butter.

I've been doing the cream biscuits since the first time I saw one of your posts about them several years ago. I am not a biscuit master, I don't make them often enough to have "the touch", but the cream biscuits are pretty much foolproof. You almost have to want to overwork them to get anything too bad as a result. I wouldn't put my biscuits up against anybody that has good biscuit skills even using the cream method but they're infinitely better than they were before and less work as a bonus.

[Darienne]

6 hours ago, andiesenji said:

I happened to make biscuits today - a very simple recipe.  One cup of heavy cream, 2 cups of King Arthur self-rising flour.  I use a Danish dough whist to mix because it blends the ingredients more rapidly with less working of the dough. Which is very important to keep the biscuits from being tough.

If you use heavy cream, you don't have to cut butter into the dry ingredients because the heavy cream contains enough fat to replace the butter.

These have a natural "split" area because I pat the dough even, roll it out to about 1/2 inch thick, fold it in half and roll lightly so it is 3/4" thick, cut and bake.

 

Thanks Andie,  I'm trying your recipe next time.  I will have to supply my own 'self-rising' flour, but I am hoping that it won't make any difference.

 

I do have a funny biscuit story.  My Mother was NOT a "cook".  And her biscuits were always made from Bisquick and like hockey pucks.  I knew naught else.   And so married, and not knowing how to cook at all, I bought Bisquick also.  One day I had run out and thought to myself.  There's probably a recipe for biscuits in my one cookbook.  (I still have that cookbook.  It has weathered [badly] 59 years of marriage.  Lost both covers long ago and many pages.  Have no idea of the publisher or anything.)  Found a recipe.  Made the biscuits and lo and behold!  Became a dedicated and 'expert' biscuit maker long before I 'found' cooking.  

[gfron1]

Yep, bullshit article. I use locally milled flours that are actually higher content. I do a three-way blend of my local farmers' soft white, hard red and Heartland Mills AP. Cold ingredients with a very light hand. In fact I don't touch my biscuits at all - all pastry cutters (to shape) and forks (to mix). I use shit butter and nothing special cream. All three restaurant reviewers in town raved about our biscuits and customer response was no different. White Lilly...GTFOH!

[Martin Fisher]

I find this very interesting:

Source: Annual Report of 1907, by the Ontario Agricultural College and Experimental Farm, Guelph, published in 1908.

Certainly NOT the American South!!!

Edited November 23, 2018 by DiggingDogFarm (log)

[Lisa Shock]

Cream biscuits are very good and quick to make. (obviously, cream tastes far better than shortening) When I made the menu for a breakfast place, they were what I chose for the house biscuit because they were easy for the staff to make consistently well. We lightly placed the dough in flan rings for consistency in portioning and to avoid inevitable re-shaping of scraps that happens when round cutters are used. They were used as the base for the eggs benedict.

[chromedome]

5 hours ago, Lisa Shock said:

We lightly placed the dough in flan rings for consistency in portioning and to avoid inevitable re-shaping of scraps that happens when round cutters are used.

 

Up here Tim Horton's uses a hexagonal cut, which I thought was genius the first time I saw it. I'm sure it's a massive production machine, as opposed to a hand-type cutter, but one day I'll see a hexagonal cutter and buy it just for biscuit-making.

[Lisa Shock]

1 hour ago, chromedome said:

 

Up here Tim Horton's uses a hexagonal cut, which I thought was genius the first time I saw it. I'm sure it's a massive production machine, as opposed to a hand-type cutter, but one day I'll see a hexagonal cutter and buy it just for biscuit-making.

 

THIS cutter looks good for home use. Looks like you could cut an entire small batch, if shaped properly, with one cut.

 

The closest I have ever seen in commercial products was a giant rolling-pin/cutter we used for the bread-dough based doughnuts at the doughnut place I worked at one summer in college. Handle to handle, it was close to three feet wide. It wouldn't work for biscuits because it cut holes out at the same time. Next time you're in a supermarket, look at the glazed doughnuts, you may be able to spot the remnants of the hexagon shape. (they get proofed and fried after cutting, so they become more round)

 

 

this smaller bismark/biscuit maker

[Martin Fisher]

1 hour ago, chromedome said:

 

Up here Tim Horton's uses a hexagonal cut, which I thought was genius the first time I saw it. I'm sure it's a massive production machine, as opposed to a hand-type cutter, but one day I'll see a hexagonal cutter and buy it just for biscuit-making.

 

It is genius.

Ateco makes them.

Here and here.

[Martin Fisher]

1 minute ago, Lisa Shock said:

 

THIS cutter looks good for home use. Looks like you could cut an entire small batch, if shaped properly, with one cut.

 

Yes!

[chromedome]

Yup, that'd be it. I'd never actually thought about it at a time when I was near the computer, but I knew they must exist. I'd be more likely to spring for the set of nested cutters in different sizes, because I don't bake a lot anymore except at holidays or when the grandkids are going to be around. It'd be handy to have 'em in different sizes.

 

[Ann_T]

On 11/22/2018 at 10:17 PM, Thanks for the Crepes said:

I would love for @Ann_Tto weigh in here, because the Queen of Breads has posted some of the flakiest and most delectable-looking biscuits in the known world! 

 

Lily white isn't available here. Don't  remember seeing it anywhere  in Canada.  You also don't  find flour with baking powder already added.

 

I make biscuits and scones out of the same good old Canadian flour I use for my breads. And I use both butter and heavy cream. No one would call either tough. The secret to flaky biscuits,  scones and pastry is not over handling the dough.

 

On 11/22/2018 at 10:43 PM, DiggingDogFarm said:

I can remember my grand-aunt, who was an excellent cook and baker in her own right, saying that nobody could make a biscuit, pancake or pie crust as well or as good as Luella—my grandmother! 

It's NOT just a Southern thing!!!

@DiggingDogFarm,  I have always been called Ann. But my first name is Luella. Named after my beloved Grandmother who went by Lilly,  but her full name was Lillian Luella. And grandma  made the best bicuits, cakes, pastries and breads.

[Anna N]

1 hour ago, Ann_T said:

Don't  remember seeing it anywhere  in Canada. 

 I buy it frequently.🙂 Here.  available in most grocery stores here in  Southern Ontario. 

[kayb]

No Martha White devotees in this bunch? I didn't know you could make biscuits with anything other than Martha White Self-Rising flour until well after I was grown.

 

[Martin Fisher]

2 hours ago, kayb said:

No Martha White devotees in this bunch? I didn't know you could make biscuits with anything other than Martha White Self-Rising flour until well after I was grown.

 

 

It is, or was, available at Dollar General stores here, in the North!

[Martin Fisher]

3 hours ago, Ann_T said:

@DiggingDogFarm,  I have always been called Ann. But my first name is Luella. Named after my beloved Grandmother who went by Lilly,  but her full name was Lillian Luella. And grandma  made the best bicuits, cakes, pastries and breads.

 

Your comment brought a HUGE smile to my face!

Thanks!