Warm, flaky, steam rising, slathered with creamy Irish butter… you’re visualizing my favorite food in the world: BISCUITS.
It started when I was small. No tube biscuits for this family, oh no. We’ve got strong southern blood in our veins, and it shows at biscuit time. My gramma or my mom would make them, and I’d sit in the kitchen and “help” by taste testing. Of course, anyone knows that when you have this kind of help, you need to double the recipe. It’s worth it for the hot biscuits, enjoyed before dinner with someone who appreciates them. Who GETS YOU. You know who you are.
There are (vast) differences between southern biscuit culture and northern biscuit culture. Here’s a bit of history from our family, showing just how different they are. My gramma and her mother (full south, all the way) went over to my grampa’s mom’s house (northerners, every one). Biscuits were on the menu. My paternal great gramma pulled the biscuits from the oven, and SET THEM ON THE COUNTER TO COOL. Gramma and Gramma Lillie waited, aghast, for these northern biscuits. Who eats cold biscuits on the first bake? Sure, for leftovers (ha! who has leftover biscuits?), with country ham for a sandwich, or buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and put under the broiler until the tops are crunchy. Those are all great uses for old, cold biscuits. But to not eat them hot? Well, I can’t even imagine. I’d have stared, too, sad at the warm biscuity goodness rising into the air and not into my mouth.
One of the ways my gramma served up biscuits was with southern ham (a country ham, salty and chewy) and milk gravy. Sometimes, she’d make redeye gravy (with coffee). Now, the only gravy I want to touch my biscuits is sausage gravy – homemade, because everyone else puts too much pepper in, and I don’t do hot.
But mostly, I love biscuits hot, buttery, and plentiful. For my birthday this year, I asked for biscuits for dinner at my parents’ house. My mom asked what I wanted for sides – ribs? salad? coleslaw? She gets me.
Recipe: Flaky, buttery biscuits with yogurt
This recipe is adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything
Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour or cake flour
3 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1 t sea salt, fine grain
5 T cold butter, plus a bit more, melted, to brush the tops
7/8 c plain yogurt (I love Trader Joe’s European whole milk yogurt) or buttermik
Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in your food processor. Add the butter, cut into bits, and pulse until it is crumbly. If you don’t have a food processor, mix it with your hands until it is completely blended.
Add the yogurt and stir until it is just mixed into a ball – no more! Knead 10 times. Too sticky? Add a tiny bit of flour. It will stick to your hands – this is normal.
Scoop out onto a floured board and pat it into a 3/4 inch rectangle. Cut rounds with a biscuit cutter or glass. Bittman notes this will produce 10-14 biscuits. Au contraire for me – 9 max. So, you might want to double or triple it. Note: In the photos below, my dough is a bit too thick – I could have gotten a few more biscuits out if it was patted out a bit more.
Place onto an ungreased cookie sheet, with or without a silpat. Take the last bit of scraps and form into the tester biscuit (cook’s reward!).
Bake 7-9 minutes, until golden brown. If you want to gild the lily, brush those tops with melted butter. My dad eats them with honey. My daughter eats them with jam. I just eat them.
Eat. Be Happy. Biscuits are good.
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As Washington, DC food entrepreneurs, Giuseppe and Mario Lanzone are certainly no strangers to hard work. Mario is a full time bartender at Napoleon Bistro & Lounge and spends his summers captaining yachts in the Mediterranean. Giuseppe competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2012 London Olympics for the United States rowing team and currently coaches rowing at Georgetown University. He applies the same Olympic intensity and drive towards he and his brother’s Washington, DC food truck, Peruvian Brothers. In fact, the duo spent two full months hunting down the perfect bread that most accurately inspired their Peruvian taste buds – now a custom Peruvian Brothers recipe on the menu at The French Bread factory in Sterling, Virginia.
“Most people who have had a rough background will admit there’s something unsettling about finding happiness after difficulty – that even after we unwrap this gift, we don’t know how to stop searching, rummaging, pilfering for something else. We walk haltingly through life, ready for the other shoe to drop. The question is not if, but when.” – Sasha Martin, “Life from Scratch” (National Geographic Society, March 2015).
favorite LA eateries. My dining companion, the unnamed couple and I were talking amongst ourselves about how the best food is sometimes the simplest. It doesn’t always need the sauce or maybe a little less of the herb; perhaps the watermelon radish pesto needs to evolve into something less. As we chatted about how disenchanted with the food we were, the phrase “keep it simple” kept popping up. Matter of fact, the female half – she was the pastry chef — of the cooking couple said, “Always take one thing away.” (Famed fashion designer Coco Chanel said that about dressing but it works for food just as well.)