Hello, blogosphere. It’s me again. How are you? No. It’s OK; I’m used to talking to myself.
I love biscuits with a capital L. Let’s face it, who does not enjoy biscuits? My trust in you is based on your love of biscuits. Definitely.
“America’s Test Kitchen The TV Companion Cookbook 2009” provides the recipe for these biscuits. This is the book that came with one of the DVD sets since I couldn’t find it on Amazon. It was borrowed from my husband’s dad, so I don’t know where it came from. The majority of the recipes in the book sound and look delicious, so I’m a bit obsessed with it right now.
The first thing I made from this book were these drop biscuits. They’re easy and quick to make. You won’t have to cube and cut cold butter, knead and roll, or worry about overhandling the dough. All you need to do to make these biscuits is mix your dry ingredients and your wet ingredients and then combine them all. It took me ten minutes to bake these. It will probably take you longer to preheat your oven to a stifling 475F than it will take to make the biscuits.
They smelled delicious when they came out of the oven, and they also tasted fantastic. Strauss butter gave them a rich butter flavor, and I liked the contrast between the golden brown crispy outside and the soft fluffy inside. They were delicious. In terms of taste, I think they are comparable to any rolled biscuit, and in terms of texture, they are just different, so it is hard to compare.
These biscuits, however, impressed me with their tenderness. You create the light, flaky layers in a biscuit when you cut the ice-cold butter into the flour and melt it in the hot oven. ATK explained that they accidentally discovered a way to make these drop biscuits light. Buttermilk and melted butter are the wet ingredients in this recipe. Due to impatience, in one trial, they combined slightly cooled melted butter with cold buttermilk straight from the fridge, resulting in clumpy butter-buttermilk mixtures. Butter refused to emulsify into a smooth liquid, no matter how hard they tried. Still, they baked the cookies with chunky butter. By creating steam in the biscuits, the clumps of butter began steam and allowed them to rise higher and bake up fluffier than all their previous trials with a smooth buttermilk mixture, similar to what happens in a rolled biscuit.
My husband said these were good, but he still prefers my more standard flaky rolled-out biscuits. In his opinion, Popeye’s biscuits were still better than these since his benchmark for biscuits is Popeye’s biscuits. Since he hadn’t had a Popeye’s biscuit for a very long time, I don’t accept his view. These biscuits are just as good as Popeye’s biscuits, and when you consider the simple preparation, they are a strong contender for my favorite biscuit recipe.
ATK also provided me with a roast chicken, which I will write about shortly.
This picture shows six biscuits, as an observant reader will notice:
There are only 5 in this picture:
You might assume that is because we ate one of them before taking the photo, and that is not the case. After it came out of the oven, the 6th biscuit gingerly slid into the sink of dirty dishwater almost immediately after it came out of the range. This was a sad moment. When I let out a gasp, he got up from the computer to make sure I was OK. My husband has a hard time looking away from the computer when he is in the zone.
You won’t be disappointed if you make these soon.
The best biscuits ever
This recipe yields 12 biscuits
Unbleached all-purpose flour, 2 cups
Baking powder, two teaspoons
Baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon
Sugar, one teaspoon
Salt, 1/4 teaspoon
Cold buttermilk, 1 cup
The biscuits are brushed with melted butter brushed on top of 8 tablespoons of unsalted butter, melted, and cooled for 5 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 475F with the rack in the middle. Lay parchment paper or a Silpat on a baking sheet.
Mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a large bowl.
In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine the cold buttermilk and eight tablespoons of melted butter, stirring until clumps form.
Stir the buttermilk mixture into the dry ingredients until the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl. To portion out even amounts of dough, use a greased 1/4 cup dry measure or a 1/4 cup ice cream scoop. Arrange the biscuits about 1.5 inches apart on the baking sheet. Drizzle the remaining butter generously over them.
Bake for 13-15 minutes, or until golden brown and crisp.