(I also tried lard and had high hopes, but the biscuits made with lard were bland and pale.) Butter created a delicious, fluffy biscuit, but it didn’t rise quite as high or create as many flaky layers as vegetable shortening. My two top fats for biscuits are cold butter or room temperature organic vegetable shortening. You will also need to add your own salt and leavening: For this recipe, you will need 2 tablespoons baking powder and 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt. It will still yield a decent biscuit, but it will be more dense than biscuits made with self-rising flour. All-purpose flour is usually a blend of hard and soft wheat flours. If you don’t have self-rising flour on hand and the idea of running to the store makes you feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, you can substitute all-purpose flour. Bake for 15 minutes rather than the 12 minutes called for in this recipe.Add an additional tablespoon of buttermilk to accurately hydrate the dough.If using a brand of flour other than White Lily: I found during my tests dough made with White Lily was wetter, slightly sticky and needed less time to bake. Other brands of self-rising flour aren’t quite as fine as White Lily. If you are a biscuit perfectionist or you want to give your new Southern neighbor a proper welcome basket, it’s worth sourcing flour from White Lily. If you can’t find White Lily flour, don’t worry-any kind of self-rising flour will still make a good biscuit it just won’t be quite as tender as a biscuit made with White Lily. I can’t find White Lily at my local grocery, so I order it online. This flour has a fine texture and low protein content, which gives baked goods a fluffy, light texture. Southern cooks swear by White Lily, a brand of self-rising flour that was originally based in the South and milled from soft red winter wheat, which is commonly grown in the South. Self-rising flour, which has salt and baking powder already added, is the best choice for making tender, country gravy-worthy biscuits. Never fear, these biscuits meet the requirement, but if you’d like to make them larger feel free to use a 4-inch biscuit cutter. Apparently, it’s not a proper biscuit if it’s not the size of a cat’s head once it’s baked. While researching biscuits and assaulting my new Southern friends with questions, I stumbled upon a phrase previously unknown to my north-dwelling ears – cathead-sized-biscuits. What’s easier still is to form a rectangle out of the dough and cut it into squares with a knife. But if your kitchen lacks an arsenal of tools, just press the dough into an 7-inch round that is 1-inch thick using your hands, then find a glass in your cupboard that’s about 3-inches in diameter or larger. WHAT TOOLS DO YOU NEED TO MAKE BISCUITS?Ī bowl, pastry cutter, fork, and biscuit cutter will do the job. My goal with this post is to explain how to handle the dough so you get a perfect or near perfect biscuits every time, and why it might be worth the extra effort to hunt down a bag of White Lily Self-Rising Flour. If a recipe already exists in the world that’s as easy as blinking and tastes delicious, then who am I to change it? I’d rather celebrate it. The fact is some things just don’t need to be improved upon. In the end, the simple recipe made with flour, buttermilk, and vegetable shortening from the back of a bag of White Lily flour won me over and that’s the recipe you see here. One glance at his breakfast menu, which boasts 15 biscuit dishes, and it was clear the man knew a thing or two about what it takes to make a proper Southern biscuit. Truer words had never been spoken.Īll the lovely Facebook responses connected me to Kurt’s friend, Kevin Clark, owner of the celebrated diner, Home Grown, located in Atlanta. She, like many moms, resorted to the occasional shortcut to feed a family of big, hungry men! I don’t blame her one bit!Īll was not lost however, he presented my biscuit queries to his Southern brethren on Facebook and told me to “buckle up” because we were about to get a windstorm of responses. I thought maybe his mom would know a trick or two, but it turns out his Southern mom makes biscuits from a can. That’s why I enlisted my friend Kurt, who’s from Georgia, to help. I’m a Yankee, after all, and taking on the venerated Southern buttermilk biscuit felt a little risky. I also tried baking soda, baking powder, sugar and salt, self-rising flour, and all-purpose flour. I used lard, butter, vegetable shortening, and combinations of them all. I tried everything when it came to this classic Southern buttermilk biscuit recipe.
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