Haha, you can make your own "Bisquik" and keep it in plastic bags. Hell, you can even cut the butter in an keep it in the fridge (not the freezer; ice crystals will fuck up your fat!) until you use it, if you plan on eating lots of biscuits.
RRRRRRRRGH NOOOOOOOOOOO butter strikes again ARGH What the fuck are these, these are flapjacks, not biscuits. I blame my sous chef.
They're going to be delicious. They're also perfect for putting under a serving of beef stew. In the future, you might have better luck with drop biscuits. They're a lot less execution-dependent, look nice and rustic no matter what you do, and taste just the same. Nice'n'crumbly'n'salty'n'good.
They are actually plenty decent. Hard to go wrong with that much butter and cream. Next time it's either drop biscuits or sweet potato biscuits, courtesy of humanodon's post from yesterday.
Haha! Ok, troubleshooting (in no order): 1. Was your baking powder fresh? 2. How sandy was your flour mix after cutting the butter into it? 3. How did you roll them out? 4. Did you fold the rolled out dough into thirds before rolling it out again? 5. Did you use a low protein (soft) flour? 6. How cold was the butter? Uh, I'm sure there are more ways to end up with low-rise biscuits. I'll remember more later.
1. baking powder was so far away from fresh
2. recipe said marble-sized butter chunks, so that's what we did
3. I think this is the problem
4. yeah, it was folded
5. all-purpose- almost bought cake flour for the decreased protein but the recipe said either or
6. this was also the problem So I think it comes down to butter. I had it super-cold (not frozen), but I was working next to the oven which is really poorly insulated and sheds heat like a mother. Also no A/C in the house, because this house is a 70 year old disaster. So we worked as fast as we could, but that dough gets warm even faster. Also, I think I rolled it too thin- recipe said half an inch, it was less. Put it together, you have a thin dough that heats through at the drop of a hat next to an oven that doubles as our main heating element in the winter. DOOMED.
In addition to humanodon's fine advice, I will also add: 1) The more you work any kind of dough, the tougher it will get. You want to go with the absolute minimum. 2) Butter should be cold-cold. Super-cold isn't that important. Working quickly is. You should go from ingredients to rolling in about 4-5 minutes tops. 3) I know Alton Brown hates the shit out of "uni-taskers" (but have you ever seen his measuring cups? WTF) but a pastry cutter is impossibly handy if you're going to make pastry. We've got a wire one very like this. I guess Oxo has a fancier one for ten bucks. Never used it. "Marble sized chunks" is bullshit. you want aquarium gravel or smaller, and you can't get that without a pastry cutter.
Those biscuits may be doomed, but notes can be taken for next time. Next time, once the butter is cut in to the flour, throw it in the freezer for half an hour. Then pull it out and add your buttermilk or milk, mix it real gently, turn it out, but work it as little as possible. I like to just pat it out, carefully fold it over itself and then gently pat it out again before cutting the biscuits. Working with butter can definitely be a pain in the ass.
Well, thanks for the laugh. Still, biscuit-cakes might taste damn good. How are they?
Well, there you go. That said, the height comes from air being in there, right? So are they dense? You may just have a kick-ass new creation on your hands. I see a future in this for you. Come dine at Biscuitcakes -Honestly, it's a solid name for a breakfast/brunch place. -I'll only ask for 5% of the annual gross for naming rights.
We're gonna put Pancake House out of business.
People pay a lot of lip service to yeast, but butter is way more the mysterious force in my book. Yeast follows the laws of biology and chemistry. Butter's rules are arbitrary and tempramental. Attempt at pastry dough still goes down as my most catastrophic culinary failure to date.cut the butter in an keep it in the fridge (not the freezer; ice crystals will fuck up your fat!)
I have the utmost respect for pastry chefs given how much more exacting their work has to be than any other kind of chef. They definitely get the short end of the food-respect stick. I've forgone choc chip cookie heartache by just melting the butter and using it that way. That might sound like sacrilege but it comes straight from Cooks Illustrated and those guys have a kitchen lab and wear bow ties even when it's not prom 1989 so, you know, they're pretty serious. Is the croissant success reproduceable now? Or is it like leave it up to the gods to decide whether my breakfast makes me sad?