BUTTERMILK BISCUIT BREAD
- 2 teaspoon bacon drippings (or lard)
- 2 cups self-rising flour
- ¼ cup cold butter cut into cubes
- 1½ to 2 cups buttermilk
Add bacon drippings or lard to an 8-inch cast iron frying pan and place pan in cold oven. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place flour in bowl and cut in butter until it resembles coarse crumbs. Add buttermilk to flour mixture. The batter will be very moist but shouldn’t be runny. Pour batter into hot cast iron pan. Spread the dough evenly over the bottom of the pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until the top is golden brown. Remove from oven and flip bread out onto a cooling rack or plate. Slice or break off and serve.
TIP: Baking dough in a piping hot frying pan gives the outside a wonderful chewy crust. The buttermilk adds a nice whang that goes perfectly with butter and honey.
TP
—Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food written by Jim Casada and Tipper Pressley
Most of the time I make plain ole biscuits, but the buttermilk biscuit bread is awful good. I think the wang of the buttermilk goes especially nice with butter and honey as well as fried eggs.
When Granny was in a hurry she’d bake her biscuit dough altogether without patting it out. Sort of like one big biscuit. Each of us would break off a hunk of biscuit to eat.
You can pick up our cookbook here.
Last night’s video: Building a Executive Oak Storage Receptacle in Appalachia & Fear of the Dentist.
Tipper
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I made this on a whim from the cookbook about a month ago and I am hooked! I don’t think I will ever pat out a biscuit again! I love these!!!!
Oh this is a good one! I made it just yesterday from your and Jim’s cookbook. Love it!
Growing up in Madison County, my extended family made the distinction this way: what you describe as “biscuit pone,” we called “biscuit bread.” Biscuits were just that, biscuits.
Sounds great!
A’s always praying for Granny.
Tipper, I wonder if you could substitute sweet milk for the buttermilk? I never buy buttermilk anymore cause we don’t drink it.
Regina, I think that would work 🙂
Momma used to make her “batter bread” with milk. Goodness gracious it was absolutely delicious. We ate that pretty often. With 7 sometimes 9 children, an uncle or 2, and grandma usually there for a meal, it went a long way. More so than biscuits or bread. Y’all stay safe and warm in this cold weather, we needed to kill off insects in the coming spring and summer weather, I hope so anyway. Prayers up for all that have ask, and then some. Love to y’all in the Holler too Miss Tipper.
It’s possible to create a good buttermilk substitute by adding a couple of tablespoons of white wine vinegar to whole milk (adjust to taste). The flavor is very close and the acid in the vinegar makes the chemistry work.
this sounds. good my momma use to make drop biscuits if she was in a rush just grab a handful of dough plop it in the pan we had these when we were going to crumble them into our gravey and eggs.
this sounds like it would be good .My mom used to make what she called drop biscuits if she was in a rush and didn’t want to roll her biscuits out nice,just grab a hand full of dough a plop it down in the biscuit pan.she would make these if we were going to crumble them in our gravy anyway
Hi Tipper,
I had lost this recipe. Thanks for putting it on line. These are the BEST biscuits that one could make.
My grandmother used this basic recipe for her pie crust too. They were so good– thick, rich, and yes tasty. The heavy cast iron pan is the secret to a good crust and tender inside. Modern pans just don’t do the trick. My family called them “cat head” biscuits. There is a restaurant in Glenn Rose, Texas just south of Fort Worth, Texas that serves them with gravy. They are good but not as tasty as those made in
a iron pan. Gravy, biscuits, cooked apples, and homemade blackberry jelly. That is good eating on a cold morning. Thanks for bringing back wonderful memories. Kathy Patterson
Hi Tipper. One Big Biscuit is my son’s favorite way to have biscuits n gravy. My recipe https://www.justapinch.com/recipes/bread/biscuits/one-big-biscuit.html?r=1
We ate this growing up in NC. My mom and grandma baked it and I still make it. Always called in “hoe cake” in our family. We’d make it with buttermilk or sweet milk, whatever we had on hand. I make this often and agree the buttermilk gives it the special wang.
We also called it Flitter Bread. Most of the time we used lard instead of butter. It’s better than biscuits to me!
Don’t remember ever having pone bread but we had biscuits and gravy every morning. Mommy would say your daddy needs a hot breakfast before going to work!
Since it’s so cokI this morning, I fixed myself a biscuit & sausage but I’ve also got plenty of Prilosec on hand!!
Drama- you mentioned Knoxville in your comment..do you remember Mary Starr on WATE channel 6. She had a cooking show and a great cookbook. That was in the 70’s. But again you may net be as old as I am!
Sadie- you make me laugh! I’d be glad to send you a set of jumper cables!!
Morning everyone. My mom didn’t make biscuits, too dry for her. She only tried cornbread once that I know of. Too dry. She did make cornmeal mush and put it in a pan, slice it and fry til crispy. She was from Romania. As a kid I wanted them so I found Bisquick. I thought they were the best thing ever. One big biscuit, strawberry shortcake. Yum. Then I became grown up and learned how to make real biscuits. Lard and butter, buttermilk. Last night I started craving biscuits. I am trying to cut back on wheat for tummy issues. So this morning I decided to make them. No self rising flour. No sour cream for my son’s favorite biscuit. There was a box of Biscuit left over from Christmas sausage balls. So I made the real thing. Flour, baking powder and soda, buttermilk. salt. Rolling over and over. I like layers. Say what you want. To me, the old way is the best way. Tipper, maybe some snow later this week for you. I hope so. Hugs for Granny. Anna from Arkansas.
I love biscuits of any kind! I never buy buttermilk but I always have milk kefir on hand, which to me is similar to buttermilk. Tipper, I’ve tried many of the recipes from your’s and Jim’s cookbook and have never been disappointed. I just made your Oatmeal dinner rolls and they are the best! Thank you for passing along all these delicious recipes.
My kids love this! Since reading your cookbook, it has been made so many times at our house. In my opinion, you can’t beat a good biscuit or biscuit bread.
❤️
This is what mama called a hoecake. It was like one big biscuit. It was delicious along with a piece of hoop cheese and some molasses. So good!!
I would have to use butter instead of bacon grease, unfortunately, but this sounds good.
Mama made something similiar to this and we called it “big bread.” It was an easy way for her to feed us breakfast before going to school instead of rolling out and cutting biscuits.
Recipe sure sounds good. Thank you!
Mom made plenty of pans of biscuit pone when her kids were at home. I don’t know why it tasted so much better than the pone bread I make. She cooked on a coal-burning stove with no way of regulating the oven. The oven temperature could have made the difference, or maybe it was the bacon grease she used in almost everything she cooked. We didn’t have sweet milk or buttermilk very often, so the pone was usually made with water. It sure was good with fresh honey or apple butter.
My mother often would make biscuit pones sometimes using just plain milk. She and daddy like to crumble them up and eat with gravy or sorghum, butter, and/or honey and jams. I liked them with butter and jam. I haven’t had them in years. I don’t eat much bread anymore because of blood sugar and increased blood pressure. Oh, the wonderful fragrance when waking up to bread baking, along with bacon or sausage and gravy. I miss those days.
This recipe or way is very old in my family. Well over a hundred years. I have made it myself for many years. In fact the first Biscuit Fest they had in Knoxville I entered it in to be told that I would have won the contest if they had known where to put my entry. They gave me prizes and money anyway. The judge told me that if Elvis had eaten my biscuit first then me be would have been his favorite. I was honored just by the kind words. This is our son’s favorite way for me to make his biscuits. I grew up with it being called Flitter Bread. That is what momma and Lucky’s side of both families called it. Thanks for sharing. Be blessed
That sounds delicious Tipper! I’m not a bread person but an occasional homemade biscuit brings comfort. My Dad used to tease me about not caring for bread. He would say, “I believe the nurses switched you with another baby in the hospital”. Have a nice Monday.
Hi Tipper
Can you tell me where your cornbread recipe is?
Thanks
Sandra, you can find it here: https://blindpigandtheacorn.com/making-cornbread/ Thank you!
God bless you friends, I’m on my way to the doctor, pray for a good outcome and safe travels, I’ll come back to this later, thank you and have a great day
My mommy always talked about a “pone” but I never really knew what it is til today! Is it the same as a hoecake? Man oh man-if that pone tastes as good as it looks, it surely is worth the making. Tipper, I’ll be honest, I have not seen my cookbooks (yours included) since sometime last spring when I began packing up to leave WV for ANY place better. Most of my cooking is the same and just rotated. Every day I care less and less about cooking or cleaning or fixing or doing. I know come good weather, I’m going and staying outside as much as possible…I’m hoping to start some chickens for eggs, but since I got very little help (yep I’m referring to my OLD sorry man) if I don’t accept the full responsibility myself, that too will turn to naught. Sometimes I wonder if I got some jumper cables if I could start Murrman’s batteries by SHOCKING THE MONKEY or just haul him on to the boneyard as is cause he’s almost surely dead. have a good day all and if you got a good man or woman-let them know!!!
Growing up we had biscuits or cornbread every evening for supper. Mama made homemade bread or rolls on Sunday. She was a busy mama with four little ones, so I remember that we almost always had one big biscuit. She had always made hers with buttermilk. She would cut the big biscuit into pieces like a pie. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I thought I would never eat another biscuit. Now, I just love them of course.
all the times in my life I wanted a biscuit but did not feel like rolling and cutting them out it never dawned on me to just make a pone…..oh, the way mama taught me to do biscuits was pour a certain amount of bacon grease in my pan on one end and then as I put each biscuit in the pan I put the biscuit in the grease then turned it over in it and started lining them up in the pan on the opposite end of the grease and if I had guessed the grease amount just right then by the time I got down to the last biscuit it was using up the last little bit of grease. The biscuits turned out brown and crispy on both sides but the rising gave you a soft middle…great with butter and sorghum or gravy (usually two biscuits a piece so everyone had one with gravy and one with jelly or sorghum. It took at least four cups of flour to make enough biscuits to feed my family one meal. Enough cornbread took four cups of meal and two of flour—there was nine of us.
praying for Granny
Gaylia, we often ate biscuits and gravy for breakfast when I was growing up. The milk gravy was made using grease from fried out fatback also called sidemeat. Our family name for this gravy was hunky doo gravy. This is my all time favorite gravy, I sure wish I had a plate of homemade biscuits and hunky doo gravy this 24 degree morning. Eating a good sweet homegrown cantaloupe along with this gravy and biscuits would have you in “hog heaven.”
my dad and most of my siblings and I love that kind of gravy with cantaloupe—mmmmm good
I always use buttermilk in my biscuits. I like the wang!
I’m about to go watch last nights video. It sounds interesting!
Enjoy your day! Love and prayers ❣️
It might not have been the same, mother would often bake a big biscuit similar to this for our breakfast. My grandmother had a small two eye or round lid wood/coal stove she would cook her and granddaddy’s breakfast on during the winter. She would fry a big biscuit of dough in a small cast iron griddle frying pan on this stove. When growing up, my parents would get up and work together to cook breakfast for us before we left for school or daddy for work. We never set down to a breakfast of cereal or toast. Even today, I seldom eat either one.
My husbands cousin has his own bees. He jars his own honey, makes candles. Well he just recently started making a cinnamon whipped honey. That stuff is SO good. If you’ve been to Texas Roadhouse and had their cinnamon butter, it is similar to that. I bet it would be lovely on a chunk of this biscuit.
My daddy would make hoecake or hocake or however it is spelled by mixing flour and milk, usually sour milk was used for biscuits and then he’d fry it in the skillet on top of the stove. I haven’t had that in years.
Laura, I didn’t think of their name for the bread mother or grandmother made that I mentioned in my comment but they called it hoecake.