Ask Smith what makes a great home-style biscuit, and he won’t skip a beat: “You need soft winter wheat flour. I prefer Martha White or White Lily. These two manufacturers make flour that makes tender biscuits. I am so in love with these flours that they go with me across America and around the world. I recently traveled twice to South Africa to teach cooking to little girls. My mother, Addie Mae, came with me, and I wanted to demonstrate to them how a mother’s love is universal. We prepared baking-powder biscuits and many other Southern specialties using these flours.”
Indeed, Smith was among the first in the U.S. to raise Americans’ consciousness to the dying family mealtime, a societal dilemma that impacts not only this country, but also all industrialized nations. Biscuits, among other cherished American foods, have the power to pull families back together, he says.
Blending Art and Science
Culinary training programs that teach pastry and baking use biscuit making to illustrate a basic technique that every future cook must learn. Gail Sokol, CC, is the author of About Professional Baking, a textbook on core baking principles and applications, and also teaches at Schenectady County Community College in upstate New York.
Biscuits are a quick bread, made with chemical leaveners rather than yeast to make them rise. “There’s no sitting around and letting the dough ferment, and it’s extremely easy,” Sokol says. “A biscuit recipe might be a few sentences, whereas a cake recipe might be a page and a half.”
That doesn’t mean biscuits are foolproof and forgiving.
“If you over mix on biscuits, it gives strength and structure, and if you really want tenderness, you have to lay off the over mixing,” Sokol says. “We are a mixing society. We like to mix things in a bowl, we want to incorporate things. But sometimes, under mixing is better.”
Sokol’s recipe for basic buttermilk biscuits mixes dry ingredients and chemical leaveners (baking powder and baking soda) and pieces of chilled fat, which she incorporates with a pastry blender just enough to achieve a mealy texture. Liquid ingredients are combined separately, and then added to the flour/fat mixture. The dough is formed and rolled out, and perfect circles are cut. Quick-serves typically use this same method, which yields a cakey interior with a flaky, golden exterior.
Biscuits have always been a way of life for Erika Webb, pastry-chef instructor at The School of Culinary Arts at Kendall College in Chicago. Webb’s method includes an extra step—folding the biscuit dough on itself, pushing the dough away, then repeating that process. This creates layers of fat and dough. The result is a biscuit with layers akin to bake-and-serve products sold in cylinders at grocery stores.
Regardless of the method, both Sokol and Webb say it’s the fat that characterizes the ultimate flavor and flakiness of a biscuit. As fat melts in the dough, gases form, creating airiness in the baked product. Both chefs prefer butter to shortening because of the film that shortening leaves in the mouth. Neither chef endorses lard.
Restaurant companies that bake their biscuits from scratch say that, in a post-9/11 world, few foods hearken to simpler, less-worrisome times better than a biscuit. The standard side dish has always been iconic as a harbinger of American hospitality. That’s even more the case today. “Just remember, wherever you go in life, stick to those things that are true,” Oprah’s chef, Smith, says. “That’s why, whomever I serve, I have never, ever been ashamed to serve a piping-hot biscuit from the oven.”
“The lion’s share of breakfast sales involves made-from-scratch biscuits in some form.”