Saturday, November 27, 2010

Joel's Butter Biscuits

I got a couple of requests for my butter biscuits, and thought I'd better comply.  There's really nothing special about them, they're just regular baking powder biscuits with a whole bunch of butter instead of shortening.  But they're darned good.

2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup milk
1 boatload butter

Preheat oven to 4500

In large bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt.  With pastry blender, cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.  Stir in milk, quickly mix just until mixture forms soft dough that leaves side of bowl.

Turn dough onto lightly floured surface.  Knead lightly to mix thoroughly.  Don't knead the dough more than you need to or the biscuits'll be tough and won't flake right.  Roll out dough about 1/2 inch thick.

With the cup you normally use for bourbon, cut out biscuits.  Place biscuits into seasoned cast iron skillet or dutch oven.  Biscuits should fill the bottom, lightly touching.  Press trimmings together and roll out until skillet is filled.

Bake 12 to 15 minutes until golden.  Serve with more butter, heated til soft.  If you've got white gravy, go nuts.

Guaranteed to make you look like a genius.

4 comments:

The Grey Lady said...

looks good Joel, boatload of butter eh? Must be part of that American system of measuring. Would you say that was closer to a LB (large boat)or a CUP (dingy) of butter?

BTW I made your Pita recipe and Mamma Liberty's whole wheat pita recipe yesterday and was thinking of posting them. There are both very good.

Big Wooly said...

What kind of flour are you using, Joel?

MamaLiberty said...

That does look like a good recipe! I never get too picky about measuring butter. :)

One thing I have learned from long experience is that such biscuits will rise perfectly if all ingredients are room temperature (65 to 70 degrees) before you begin to mix them.

And if you don't have a pastry blender, a simple knife and fork will cut the butter into the flour just fine, only might take a tad longer.

Now I'll have to try these with some of the leftover turkey! YUM

Joel said...

I used to vacillate between bread flour and all-purpose. But now I've got a big tub of gluten, so I just use whatever all-purpose flour I can find in big sacks.