Biscuits

[AestheticDeath]

Share your recipe. My father has tried a couple times recently and he can't come up with something he likes. They tend to me small/flat etc.

He wants something like the Grands biscuits that come in the can, and are freaking ginormous...

If anyone has the Grands recipe somehow, please share that!

[Amber]

Grands biscuits knock-off recipe

2 C all-purpose flour
1 T baking powder
1 t salt
1T sugar
1/3 cup COLD butter (butter flavored shortening or margarine will work)
1 C milk

Mix dry ingredients.
Cut in shortening.
Add milk about 1/8 cup at a time. Once you've added close to 3/4 of a cup, add in by tablespoons. Once dough has pulled away from the side of the bowl, add one last tablespoon. Somedays 3/4 of a cup of milk is sufficient, others the whole cup is needed. It all depends on the humidity.
Knead just a couple of times, but don't overdo it or the biscuits will turn out tough.

For extra big, fluffy biscuits, wrap dough in greased aluminum foil at this point and refrigerate for a couple of hours or overnight. This gives the baking powder time to work. This step is not essential but does give fluffier biscuits.

When ready to cook, heat oven to 425.
Place dough on floured surface and pat (don't knead) flat.
Cut with floured cutter or round glass.
Place on ungreased cookie sheet. For softer outside, place so that they're touching each other, for crisper outside, place farther apart.
Bake 10-13 minutes.

[ElvenFury]

Knead just a couple of times, but don't overdo it or the biscuits will turn out tough.

Yeah, this. Your old man is probably just working the dough too hard, which makes glutten, and glutten will make them tough and chewy.

/Alton Brown

[Asha]

This is where we have a completely different meaning for something over here going on the ingredients you just mentioned.

[ElvenFury]

This is where we have a completely different meaning for something over here going on the ingredients you just mentioned.

Alright, you crazy foreigner, it's time to play "NAME THAT BAKED GOOD!"

[Kuyuk]

Yeah, this. Your old man is probably just working the dough too hard, which makes glutten, and glutten will make them tough and chewy.

/Alton Brown

Gluten? ;-)

[WRoss]

Alright, you crazy foreigner, it's time to play "NAME THAT BAKED GOOD!"

1) Muffin

2) English muffin

3) Biscuit

4) Fried Mushrooms?

[Archigeek]

First off, kneading the dough does not make gluten. Gluten is already there, as it is found naturally in almost all forms of flour, unless it is deliberately removed. That's kind of a technicality though, as Elvenfurry is correct that kneading the batter does make it into dough. What kneading does, is align the gluten strands and make the end product more uniform for lack of a better term. It can also, when you're actually making bread, break down the gluten structure when you're re-kneading, which is sometimes called for, but never in biscuits.

Biscuit "dough" should really be more like batter in my oppinion. You should not knead it at all, and you shouldn't even over-mix it. In fact, my favorite types of biscuits are what are called "drop" biscuits. You just make the batter, scoup it out with a spoon and plop it on the sheet pan. Think of biscuits as a closer cousin to pancake batter than to bread dough.

One key way to make good biscuits, is to add the cold butter referenced in Amber's recipe. You need to do it right though, and here's how you do it and how/why it works:

What the butter does, (and I wouldn't use margarine or shortning for biscuits), is that it creates steam pockets when it melts away. This is a similar principle to how you make croissants. What makes a croissant light and fluffy? It's the fact that about a tablespoon of freakin butter is folded in cold, and thereby remains separate from the flour. Croissants are basically like the folded steel of a katana, except the layers are butter and flour. If the butter warms up and melts it disolves into the dough and you've ruined it, and you're going to get something relatively hard, not light and flaky. The same applies to biscuits, except it's way easier to make biscuits. I think the best way to do it that I've found, comes from a recipe on epicurious.com for cheese and herb biscuits, (which are really great by the way). In that recipe, you freeze the whole stick of butter, and then grate it with a cheese grater, right over your flour mixture. It's a bit cumbersome, but you get nice, small pieces of frozen butter that won't disolve into your dough. The other thing you can do is basically the same thing, but just pare off little pieces of cold butter with a knife. In either case, you want to gradually, but quickly, evenly distribute the butter pieces into the flour BEFORE you add the other wet ingredients. This way they get coated with flour and thereby stay separated, which is exactly what you want. You need to work fast, for the same reason. Grate/pare some of the butter into the flour, then mix it in lightly so it's evenly distributed, then grate/pare some more, etc. continuing until it's all nice and evenly distributed in the flour. Then proceed with your recipie. Biscuits are just one of those things that if you go slowly and carefully, you'll actually make a worse end product.

The Joy of Cooking also has some good biscuit recipes, and anyone and everyone should have a copy of The Joy of Cooking.

[Amber]

1) Muffin

2) English muffin

3) Biscuit

4) Fried Mushrooms?

I cheated and googled 4. It's deep-fried oreos, which look and sound awful.

[Sean of the Thread]

Fuck biscuits.

Get him on some southern cornbread asap.

If that's not available there's really nothing wrong with a .25 cent box of JIFFY CORN MUFFIN MIX ftw.