Since we’ve been talking about make do foods many of you have mentioned biscuits. When I was growing up Granny either made biscuits or cornbread to go with supper. I was a biscuit girl and lucky for me even if she made cornbread for supper there might be biscuits left from breakfast.
My Granny Gazzie (granny’s mother) made the best biscuits ever-period. She made them every morning for breakfast and then she put the leftover ones in the top warmer shelf of her wood cook stove. We typically didn’t visit Granny Gazzie except for Sunday dinner. As soon as I stepped in the door I made a bee line for the kitchen to see if I could sneak a biscuit before dinner was served.
When The Deer Hunter and IÂ were first married, I tried lots of biscuit recipes and was never totally pleased with any of them.
One day when I was complaining about my biscuits Granny told me she thought Pap’s Mother made the best biscuits and she used cream and self-rising flour.
I bought a carton of whipping cream mixed it with my White Lily self rising flour and I’ve been making them that way ever since.
I use a 2 to 1 ratio: 2 cups of self rising flour to 1 cup of cream (if I don’t need as many 1 cup flour to 1/2 cup cream). I mix it up flatten it out with my hands and a little additional flour-use a biscuit cutter-place them on a greased baking pan-pop them into a 450 degree oven on bake-and in about 10 minutes I have some really good biscuits.
For a good while, a friend, a really really nice friend shared her fresh cream with me. Replacing the whipping cream with fresh cream brought my biscuits right up there with Granny Gazzie’s. So if you have access to fresh cream by all means use it.
Granny’s biscuits are good and she has her own way of making them, but I could never master her method.
I like biscuits with eggs, with gravy, with chocolate gravy, with tomatoes, with honey, with sorghum syrup, with jelly, with ham, with fried potatoes, with sausage…in other words with just about anything. And strangely enough, I like a plain biscuit with a sup of coke.
What’s your favorite way to eat biscuits?
Tipper
Hi Tipper,
I am wondering if this is the same recipe you use for your milk bread? I thought you used all purpose flour with yeast for that but mixed those ingredients with whipping cream. I have been looking for that video and canât find it. Please let me know about this as I am eager to try that bread.
Sandra-the only bread recipe I can think of that I make that uses whipping cream is this biscuit one with self-rising flour. I do make oatmeal rolls with yeast you can see here: https://blindpigandtheacorn.com/oatmeal-dinner-rolls/ and here’s a bread I make in a bread machine with yeast: https://blindpigandtheacorn.com/miss-cindys-bread/ I hope this helps đ
Tipper,
I’ve enjoyed all of your videos that I’ve watched. Grandma Casstevens baked the best biscuits I’ve ever had. I think part of the secret was she used a wood burning stove. I will try your recipe. It looks good. Here’s a poem I wrote about her biscuits. It’s in my first book of poetry on Amazon, Nature: Human & Otherwise.
Early Morning Manna at Grandmaâs
Grandma greeted the sunâs first peek through curtains
while the household slept. Her biscuits appeared
on the breakfast table as the men sat to eat.
I loved the fresh-baked aroma wafting
from her wood-burning stove.
Butter churned from fresh sweet cream, skimmed
from Grandpaâs dairy,
dripped out corners of mouths
after biting into the warm chewiness
of one, then another.
Imitating Uncle Gray, I swirled butter into molasses,
spread a dollop before each bite.
When finished, the men got up. Left. No one uttered:
Thank you. Delicious. Please excuse.
Then Grandma fixed her plate and ate âŠ
⊠the only time I saw Grandma eat.
Later, she dish-toweled the biscuit platter,
refrigerated sides, milk, and meat. After supper,
the little and quite large piggies feasted
on her biscuits in their pen,
along with leftovers scraped from plates
and serving bowlsânot seen again.
At home we ate a prefab version popped out
of cardboard tubes, buttered with plastic-tasting oleo.
No one asked for seconds.
â
i make them like you do, only i use sour cream! maybe a little sugar if i want, but usually just white lilly and sour cream, drop biscuits. sour cream keeps longer in the frig so i’m more likely to have some on hand when i want biscuits!
Biscuit /ËbÉȘskÉšt/ is a term used for a variety of baked, commonly flour-based food products. The term is applied to two distinct products in North America and the Commonwealth of Nations and Europe. For a list of varieties, see the list of biscuits and cookies.http://www.needithosting.com/
Mad Snapper mentioned you in her post today. Had to come over, this recipe sounds amazing.
i missed this post somehow, can’t wait to try this i love love love biscuits and can never make them and neither could mother. these i think i can handle.
I’ll tell you what. This coming spring if you will take some strawberries (wild ones if you can get them) and cover them good with sugar and let them sit overnight in the fridge. The next day give the strawberries to somebody who likes them and pour that lovely pink juice over some crumbled up cold biscuits. You’ll think you died and went to heaven.
Love biscuits anyway, anyhow. Sad to say, I couldn’t make any if my life depended on it. My grandmother could make them with her eyes shut. Every now and then, totally against drs orders, I’ll get an order of sausage gravy and biscuits from Hardees. And Cracker Barrell — we always ask for biscuits AND cornbread…LOL
I am a couple of days late, but can’t pass up adding a word. Homemade biscuits brings to mind family history, traditions, antiques ( dough bowls and pans ), and keeping a taste of childhood ever present. My husband is from rural MS where he said that ‘cathead’ biscuits were on the table breakfast and supper 7 days a week, with cornbread made at lunch and supper, as well.
Cathead, of course, means that those lightly crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside morsels were always about the size of a cat’s head…Perfect for dragging through a big pat of butter mashed into a pool of sorghum syrup in the mornings, and slathered with butter and a myriad of homemade jams, jellies, and apple butter at supper time…Memories of biscuits being made by his grandmother and mother at the oblong hand carved dough bowl, where flour was mixed by hand with ‘sweet milk’ and a scoop of lard or shortening, then a big pinch was rolled in floured hands before being plopped onto a heavy baking pan causes Larry to close his eyes and make a trip back 60 years! I must tell that I tried for many years to duplicate that exact biskit, shaped in their hands, laid tightly together so that they rose perfectly, to no avail.. They had a special texture that has eluded me. Larry says that the perfect biskit will allow a hole to be poked in the side to pour in syrup for the best in the world any time of day snack…My grandmother mixed hers in a her mother’s crockery bowl, kneaded right on the floured butcher block counter, cut with a Big tin cutter, and laid onto a blackened pan that I still use nearly day to bake Our biskits. That pan will be 100 yrs old next year! My grands loved butter and local honey..She also put homemade mayo, tender green onions and bacon between cold biskits to make a sandwich for lunch..Odd, but delicious..Larry and I love our biskits with stewed dried apples or apple butter. For a special treat, peppered sausage white gravy with summer tomatoes alongside is heaven on a plate! Tipper, this simple, but nostalgic topic is one of the reasons that you have a faithful following of readers. You truly have a knack for spotlighting the endearing traditions of our past in order for us to live more contented lives in the present!
Thanks, and ever thanks for sharing pieces of your heart with folks that honor family and HOME.
There was a time I could make good biscuits just like my mother made hers. She had a biscuit pan that was filled with flour and she put in crisco and buttermilk and she could make a batch of the best biscuits in about five minutes. The secret is in the kneading, I think. She taught me how to pinch off a piece of the dough and hold it lightly in the palm of one hand while gently molding it into a circle with the other hand. Mother had no recipe, but she didn’t need one. She made biscuits three times a day for fifty years. How many biscuits would that be? Her pan held about twelve, if I remember right. Boy this talk about biscuits has my mouth watering.
As I have gotten older, I have also gotten lazier. So, I used the frozen biscuits for a while. The biscuits were not so bad initially, but something has changed. I am not too impressed with them so I am back to home made. I use cake flour and buttermilk. I am going to buy some cream this afternoon and try your recipe! Thanks for all the ideas and topics that “regular” folks can relate to.
When I finished school I worked at Hardee’s and I made the biscuits. We used buttermilk and white lily flour. That was 20+ years ago. I am not sure how they do it now. I also made a lot of sausage gravy.
Because we try to use a least a little whole wheat flour in our baked goods we’ve gone through a lot of recipes as well, some just don’t hold up. But then we found one called Buttery Breakfast Biscuits and they are very good under a light hand.
I love biscuits just about any way I can get them, but ultimately I am in biscuit heaven with fresh butter and berry jam, ooh no wait lemon curd! That’s the very best!
My mom made biscuits but like her pie crust recipe which was the best ever, she did it with no recipe really, she did it part by memory and part by feel. No amount of standing at her elbow translated for me. So I make do with the recipes I can find.
Congratulations, Tom!!!
I like biscuits with almost anything. But my all time favorite is hot right out of the oven with lots of butter. I can eat just that for supper and be plenty satisfied.
Daisygirl-thank you for the comment-so glad youre enjoying the Blind Pig!
Blind Pig The Acorn
Music, Giveaways, Mountain Folk
All at http://www.blindpigandtheacorn.com
Gravy!! Could eat it every day. Or sliced tomato on it with plenty of butter. Or crispy bacon with Tabasco. Or just real butter & a lot of it. My brother & son eat catsup on cold biscuits & my SIL will make a sandwich of cold biscuits & left over fried potatoes (if there ever are any.)
Mama makes them in a bowl of flour, makes the hole in the flour, pinches up a wad of Crisco& adds buttermilk. She works it squeezing it through her fingers & then flours her hands & makes them out kind of rolling them under till they’re round –catheads!! She kept the bowl & sifter inside a “lard stand” with flour in it. Sadly, she’s about unable now to cook at all.
I use lard–work it in by hand or with a fork, add sweet milk to right texture & roll out & cut. Sometimes I do drop biscuits. My family loves them made with cheese & garlic added & topped with garlic butter & parsley flakes & we have then with spaghetti. My husband & I both could make a good meal off of hot cornbread or biscuits.
Granny had a styrefoam ice bucket (they were popular for awhile & my little brother would bite everyone he got alone with–little teeth prints all around the edge.) Anyway the cold biscuits were in this bucket at her house.
We hardly ever had bought loaf bread & Mama nor any of my relatives made any yeast breads. Mama made biscuits every morning of our lives as children & either biscuits or cornbread for supper every night.
We eat biscuits with a whole swag of things. We had a friend visit from Alabama about two months back and I cooked a pork roast in the kettle and made some biscuits to go with it and the side dishes. After the meal we were sitting and talking and I asked him if the biscuits were like back home. He said “Well Shane, those biscuits were perfect, the best I have had, well wait a second, Jesus is perfect, but those biscuits were pretty darn good” : )
I am as happy as a pig in mud to hear he enjoyed them.
I make them just like you Tipper but I have been using a cup of full cream milk in mine for years, have never tried the cream but am going to give it a shot.
Homemade biscuits & homegrown maters!
Your biscuits sound delicious. It must be great to have had such great source material!
Love those cathead biscuits! I’ve used a “granny” recipe I snagged off the internet. Not sure whose granny she is, but her biscuits are quite good. I will most definitely try yours.
I like biscuits with rasberry jam or split and toasted and topped with honey. Yum, yum! Or sometimes I just like my biscuit with butter. Have you ever eaten a biscuit with peanut butter? That’s pretty good too.
Hot biscuits + homemade apple butter = heaven.
I love a good biscuit. I don’t like my own though. I’m going to town tomorrow, gonna get some cream and try this recipe!! Thanks. I really enjoy your blog, you feel like family. The music is great too, my uncles and Dad always played music when they got together. My uncles have all passed on and this is such a comfort. My folks are from the Ozark hills of Arkansas.
Daisygirl
I’ve tried several recipes & my biscuits have always been bland and flat. This is the simplest recipe I’ve ever seen & they look fluffy & tasty.
Stacey
SWPA
My biscuits have never been the best. Hockey pucks might be more tender. lol
I am gonna have to try your recipe. Couldn’t sound more easy, and anything with cream is gonna be yummy.
Ketchup-I bet my girls would like that! No my chocolate gravy is really chocolate : ) I’ll show you how to make it soon!
Blind Pig The Acorn
Music, Giveaways, Mountain Folk
All at http://www.blindpigandtheacorn.com
I like milk gravy with a dallop of ketchup. I don’t get it very often as the blacksmith will nonly eat brown gravy. I wonder if that is the same as your chocolate gravy?
I love buttery crusty biscuits! I’ll have to try that cream recipe… haven’t found one I really like that’s not TOO labor intensive.
Tipper,
All these receipes are fabulous and some I want to try. Some I knew about and have tried. The biscuit recipe and way of making them that sounds like the one my mother-in-law used is the one Joji told about. My wife said that sounds like the way her Momma used to do – especially the way the left over flour was always dry.
There is one thing I am still not sure of is the kneading process. It is not talked about by most of the readers. I have heard that is the secret; too much and the biscuits will be tough and not enough the biscuits will be too crumbly.
At any rate, we have learned some new tricks!
Country ham is the way I like to eat biscuits, or with syrup, bacon and eggs, gravy over them, with jelly, and always with butter.
Here’s one that might knock you out. Once in another century, I was a little boy and several of my cousins were at my Great Grandma’s house and we wanted a snack and she cut some green raw unions-not the totally green tops but some of the green in them- and the biscuits were cold and If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it. It was kinda like putting peanuts in your coke; it will surprise you. They were good! Still, at that age anything would be good when you were hungry!
Bradley
I cannot make biscuits – ask my children – I may have to try your recipe. My mama makes then every day still – she was mixing biscuit dough the night I came in sporting my sparkly new engagement ring. (funny what you remember). Love the girls dresses.
Hi Tipper!
Here’s a great biscuit recipe and it’s really simple!
http://www.survivalcommonsense.com/2010/09/16/handy-biscuit-recipefeed/
And check out my new survival cooking blog!
http://survivalsense.blogspot.com/
I’m sitting here typing and listening to your songlist…very pleasant!
Have a great weekend!
Leon
Oh, and biscuits are not homemade around here. I’m trying to tackle the fresh ground wheat sandwich loaf first. Maybe I should change goals and learn to make biscuits instead. We eat biscuits every weekend, usually with chocolate gravy or milk gravy with the fixins’. I have my m-i-l’s handwritten recipe for “baking soda biscuits” but I suspect it came from the side of a bag or can that promoted the use of their product. This post and the comments about technique and ingredients have given me nerve enough to try my hand now.
Hi Tipper!!!
I just happened to see where Judy posted this link on her FB and I said to myself, “Self, you haven’t visited Tipper’s blog in ages. What’s up with that?!!” So here I am. :o)
I see your girls are getting big, like mine. Crissy gets her braces off in May and had her first homeschool “prom” here at our house where most of the girls wore high-top sneakers with their pretty dresses. I love that these girls aren’t afraid to let their personalities shine through!
Best wishes to you and yours,
Teresa in KY
Tipper those are some mighty fine biscuits sitting there, What time is Supper??????? hahaha
I make mine with 2 cups of self-rising flour and about 1/4 cup lard, I never measure and then enough milk to mix them up with, I always cut my lard in with my dough cutter and then roll em’ up in my hand and pop em’ in the oven, I cook mine at 500 for 9 minutes. I also add grated cheese, italian seasoning and garlic salt to them sometimes.
My grandmother used to make a “stack cake” and I tell you those were the best cakes ever, I just liked the little cakes by their selves with fresh fruit over them, Those were the ” Good Ole’ Days”!!!!!!
I like mine most with just butter, but sometimes I put a little honey on. Buttermilk makes good biscuits, too. Up here in Ohio it’s hard to get good biscuits in a restaurant. Ma mostly baked bread, and I guess that was more common up here. Most people don’t bake at home any more, but I can make bread, biscuits or pie. My wife is from WVa, and biscuits are more traditional in her family. She likes gravy or honey on hers.
Tipper,
It appears you like biscuits as
much as I do, only trouble is I
ain’t never made any. Yours sure
look good, but never tried one with a coke. When I fix Chicken
and dumplings I stir up a biscuit
mix in a bowl and spoon drop ’em
in. Now that I can do well…Ken
Biscuits are one of my favorite things in this world. I like them any way you fix them! I mentioned you on my Facebook page today and your biscuit recipe.
I usually make them from the box mix, but I am sure your homemade recipe would be better. I’ll have to give your recipe a try. I usually eat biscuits with honey or cane syrup, as a breakfast biscuit sandwich with bacon egg and cheese, or chopped up with peppered pork sausage gravy. A favorite dinner of mine is batter fried catfish, baked beans, and biscuits!
John Pallister
http://www.pointlesspicks.com
Twitter @PointlessPicks
Love a good sausage patty in a good homemade biscuit!
Ain’t nothing better than a plain ole biscuit–maybe with a slice of tomato with it. I make mine with 2 cups self-rising flour, 1/4 cup shortening, and 1 cup buttermilk. I want to try your way of making biscuits, though.
Sadly, biscuits aren’t that common in the kitchens this far north. Lucky for me, my childhood best friend and her family were from Georgia. They lived on the corner, and I spent more time at their house than I did at my own. Mrs. T was a real southern lady, but she was certainly no cook, with one exception – she made biscuits to die for! They had a lovely tough, crisp crust and were tender and light in the middle, absolute heaven! She was so casual about it too, she’d just toss in a handful of flour, a bit of this and a pinch of that, mix briefly, pat the dough out and cut them with a water glass. She always used self-rising flour, but I don’t remember the other ingredients. I wish I had been old enough to learn her secrets! That was nearly four decades ago, and I’ve never had a biscuit as good as Mrs. T’s! I like them best right out of the oven and dripping with butter.
This has brought back a whole stream of happy memories, thanks Tipper!
We love to eat our biscuits with butter and cane syrup. YUM!
MMMMMMMM-Biscuits! I make some called Buttery Breakfast Biscuits from better homes and gardens.
The biscuit recipe I use is from the Pioneer Woman cookbook. They are so good that a batch disappears in about 0.3 seconds and they aren’t the lowest calorie food.
Biscuits and sausage gravy is my favorite! I always make biscuits with butter and half & half. While we love them, my hubby prefers cornbread and will eat the whole loaf at one time if let him.
since i love all things “bread” cornbread or biscuits will do for me. biscuits are my favorite of all bread and i can’t make them and neither could my mother or grandmother. but my friends mother made the mostest and bestest and BIGGEST biscuits. i lived to go to her house, just for the biscuits.
I learned to make proper biscuits from my wife’s father who learned from his mom. We make them essentially like yours but with some shortening also. They are sooo fluffy! When we first got married, I weighed 145 lbs. One year later, I weighted 170. Hmmmm…the cause? We ate biscuits and bacon every single day for breakfast!
I always make buttermilk biscuits. I roll the dough out with a rolling pin. I like biscuits and sausage gravy, with tomato gravy on top, with jam, with butter and crumbled up in my oatmeal. My grandma always cooked bread of some type at every meal.
Im going to try this!! They look so good!! I make mine with buttermilk. – Amy Jo Phillips
My husbands Granny made te best biscuits. I would watch and be amazed at how he didit. Sh had a tupperwar bowl with a lid that was about 16″ wide full of self rising flour about 10lbs. She would get that out and make a well in the center add her lard and buttermilk and bring in the flour from the sides with her hands and mix until she had a soft ball and then flip it out on to the counter. That bowl of flour would be dry as if she had never used it.
I had not made a biscuit in my 55 years of life, when I was going over the recipes at Martha White site I ran across a cream biscuit recipe, I decided to try it so I have been making them now about 10 years, being a diabetic needless to say I don’t get to make them very often. My favorite way to eat them are with sausage or bologna gravy and chocolate gravy now & then.
Have been using self-rising flour to make biscuits forever. Easy to do with milk and a little cooking oil. Usually flatten out the dough and cut the biscuits out using a jelly glass.Sometimes i just use a spoon and drop them onto a greased cast iron skillet.My grandsons love them.
I wish I could remember how my grandma made her biscuits. They were a highlight of my visits, because my mom never baked anything! I remember lard and flour going in the mix, but don’t know about the rest. They were wonderful, though!
I love biscuits, either with sausage gravy, just sausage patties, or my favorite way, with good sorghum molasses and a glass of milk.
We had biscuits every morning growing up. I never learned to like cold biscuits because they never lasted long enough to get cold at our house. Then I spent two years in the Orient with nary a biscuit! When they turned me loose at Camp Pendleton I walked about a mile and a half to Denny’s and had biscuits and gravy as my first meal. Now, I make my own with White Lily self-rising flour, Crisco and buttermilk. They usually come out somewhere between Mother’s and Denny’s on the Goodness Scale.
I’ve tried various biscuit recipes, but the one everyone here favors is: buttermilk, flour, butter, salt, baking powder, mixed up/work only slightly and put in a hot (450) oven for 12 minutes. They always turn out perfect. Eating them is like I’ve died and gone to heaven!
I like biscuits any way/shape or form, and hot or cold .. I’m not picky!
My husband insists that he have bread with every meal. His mother always made either biscuits or cornbread every day. I think that may have been out of necessity. The bread was not only scrumptious but it helped fill up lots of empty tummies in place of the precious meat and vegetables that were hard to come by for large families.
I’ve always watched his mother and mine make biscuits from flour, lard and milk. But I take the shortcut – I use Bisquik baking mix and buttermilk for mine.
I’ve heard lots of people around here who use the cream & self rising flour – we call them “angel biscuits”. I had forgotten about them, but I’m gonna try them on my DH tonight – see if he notices the difference.
Give me a good hot biscuit and some of “pap’s gravy” and I’m in hog heaven! I even love just a good hot biscuit with REAL butter in it. O Tipper, you’re making my mouth water just to think about a hot biscuit!
My favorite way to eat a biscuit is to poke a whole fill it with syrup or molasses while it is still hot…yum, yum. We call them syrup dobbies. Thanks for sharing.
I remembered the first biscuits I ever made…would have been good for target practice.
Have a great day!
Ooh…I want to try making them your way. I use flour, bp, salt and butter in mine. Chocolate gravy is my favorite accompaniment, I think. Hmmm.think tomrrow’s breakfast has just been decided! Have a great weekend, Tipper.
my grandmother fascinated me making biscuits or cakes, piecrusts, etc. She had a “Hoosier” cabinet with the flour container and built in sifter. She kept a large pan of flour which she would take out, form a hole in the middle and proceed with pour in her ingredients and mix it by hand, making a ball which she then rolled out with a glass bottle. How in heaven’s name she kept from slopping all that flour and milk together I’ll never know but she worked fast and mixed exactly what she needed. I shudder to think of what it would have been had I tried it. She, too, used a wood stove up until her death in 1957. If she visited us she’d apologize for her cooking on our electric stove – bread didn’t rise right! and if she used a gas stove she was sure you could get a taste of the gas đ
Tipper–It seems that a talent for making light, fluffy, incredibly tasty cathead biscuits is one which threatens to become part of that world we have lost.
Just thinking about biscuits carries my thoughts directly back to my paternal grandmother, Grandma Minnie Casada. She made biscuits almost daily until her final years, and for her it was as much a part of the daily routine of life as getting up in the morning. Interestingly, she sometimes made what we called “biscuit bread” as opposed to individual biscuits. The only difference was that, rather than cutting out individual biscuits prior to popping them in the oven, she would put the whole batch of prepared dough on a flat baking sheet and cook it that way. You just broke or cut off a piece of the size you wanted to eat.
As for my favorite ways to eat biscuits, I think I have three favorites:
(1) A big old biscuit enclosing a red ripe slice of a tomato fresh from the garden and adorned with a couple of slices of crisp bacon
(2) A biscuit throughly drenched with redeye gravy.
(3) A biscuit (or may a couple of them) crumbled up and topped with a hefty serving of hamburger gravy.
Caloric, cholesterol heaven!
Jim Casada
http://www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Tipper,
This is gonna be good! Can’t wait to see all these ideas.
Bradley
Tipper, NOW I’m hungry! My mama made biscuits every morning. She would take the leftover biscuits and the leftover chocolate gravy, then add some other ingredients for a fantastic bread pudding. Wish I had paid more attention to how she did it.
My Dad made the best biscuits I ever ate…self-rising flour, shortening, milk…He cut the shortening in with his hands, added the milk and kneaded until it held together, rolled out with a touch of flour on board and rolling pin…already had the oven on hot, cut the biscuits, popped on the pan and baked…
The trick he said was cold, milk, shortening, no overworking the shortening into the flour, quick knead and cut..Over kneading made heavy hard biscuits…also too much shortening the same…(he was a short-order cook in college)
We like honey, gravy, sorghum, butter and jelly…but the best breakfest is fresh buttered creamed corn on hot biscuits with fresh from the garden sliced red tomatoes…yummm
Thanks Tipper…I’m hungry!
Well Tipper,
After you told me about this my husband has been so happy what a great recipe! (I finally can make biscuits just like his Mother’s (maybe better!)
vickie
Those biscuits look yummy! I make my biscuits with buttermilk and I use frozen butter that has been grated into the flour. My mother always made hers with White Lily flour but can’t find it around here so I use Robin Hood. I think my favorite way to eat biscuits is with butter and homemade jam.
I’m ashamed to say my biscuit recipe is on a can of Pillsbury refrigerated biscuits.
that is one area I have never been talented; I do think I might try yours though Tipper.
My biscuit recipe is fairly basic — milk, flour, lard, sugar. I don’t have access to fresh cream, or I would certainly use it. Biscuits and peppered gravy is a favorite around here. đ
Mmmm! Love a good hot biscuit with butter. Add some homemade jelly, honey or molasses to it. Or a slice of tomato.
I think I make pretty good biscuits, my family thinks so too. I use nothing but White Lily unbleached self rising. I add shortening and buttermilk to mine. I always cut mine out or either pat the dough into the pan for a “cake”. My son likes this the best. If you wokr the dough too much it gets tough and heavy.
I remember the first “homemade” biscuit I had ever eat…I lived in the big city of Las Vegas as kid and in the city we ate rolls. I was about 7 yrs old and we went on vacation to Haywood Co NC. My aunt made a mess of biscuits. I ate one and then 2…when I was done eating I had eat probably a half dozen….they were scrumptious! I did move to Haywood Co when I was 9 and grew up there. Since then I have learned how to make them and have taught me girls to make them and our favorite is good ol’ biscuits and sausage gravy. When I make mine, I don’t measure anything…I use White Lily self-rising flour and pour a decent amount in a bowl, then eyeball the butter ( I use real butter) and then add in enough milk to make a ball…roll them out on a flour counter and use a drinking glass to cut out the biscuits. I absolutely love chocolate gravy on biscuits…I have never tried making it though.
Who doesn’t love a good biscuit! I love them with tomato gravy the best.
A CD? Really? How did I miss this? I want one; I already have my list of ten made out.
I thought my biscuits were good in the past, but not so long ago I found out the real secret is self-rising flour. When I start milking my cow again, I’ll have to try this. Of course, we’re watching our calories, so I can’t make them often.
My sister (Vera Guthrie) created a Facebook page called Vintage Vera
(http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Vintage-Vera/119328038077569) where we tell “front porch stories.” Our brother (Garland Davis) told this about Mama’s Biscuits in a topic on the Discussion Tab:
“Any baker will tell you that the secret to fluffy tender biscuits lies in the ingredients, temperatures and mixing procedures. Only chilled shortening or butter or a combination of the two should be used. Flour, baking powder and salt must be meticulously measured and sifted together. The chilled butter and/or shortening should be cut in until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. The chilled liquid, milk or buttermilk should be added and the dough mixed only until it has formed. Do not over mix. The resulting mixture should be placed in the refrigerator for at least thirty minutes. After chilling move the dough to a floured board and roll or pat to the desired thickness. Bake.
All that being said, I watched my Mama make biscuits many times. She would put the flour into the sifter (no measuring cup or scale) and sift into her mixing bowl. She would then add baking powder with a soup spoon and salt by pouring some in her hand from the Morton salt container. She then reached into the lard bucket and got a hand full of lard and worked it into the flour mixture. She added the liquid and âworked the hell out of itâ. Instead of rolling and cutting her biscuits, she would squeeze off a portion of dough between her thumb and forefinger, shape it and place it into the greased biscuit pan. This made for a biscuit with a tough crust and a chewy interior.
My Uncle Frank once said that his Mama, my Granny Davis, made biscuits that wouldnât fall apart when you drug them through a plate of gravy or âlasses. I remember him pouring about a half cup of molasses onto a plate grabbing four biscuits and making a breakfast of it.”
Mama made great cornbread too and we have her recipe in the Vintage Vera Cookbook.