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Making biscuits.
Nov. 28th, 2008 11:09 pmThanksgiving vacation! Whee!
I didn't go to work on Weds (took the half-day off), and they give us Friday off too, so it's like five whole days of NO WORK! And I'm enjoying the hell out of myself so far.
Today I ran errands and then this evening I was reading one of my crafting blogs -- a blog I especially like because the girl who writes it posted a free pattern for a stuffed sting ray that I recently made and adored -- and she posted a recipe for biscuits. And I thought, hey, I can make those vegan! So I did. I used coconut oil because I don't have crisco in the house, and soy milk. God, they're good. Mister Smarty-Pants and I kind of injured ourselves on them.
While recovering from biscuit-making, it occurred to me that there must be like 100,000 videos on youtube featuring people making biscuits! And that would be fun to see! So I did a search for "making biscuits" but it turns out that Cute Overload has forever changed the meaning of that term because all the results were videos of kittens kneading at the air. That's called "making biscuits" I guess. Cute! But not what I was looking for.
"Baking biscuits" yields better results--many videos that dutiful sons have taken of their old, fat, southern moms making biscuits. They scoop the crisco out of the can with their fingers. It is awesome.
And then I found an equally fascinating parallel universe of videos of Indian cooks making tea biscuits with nearly the same ingredients, but, like, tapioca starch instead of flour and other things like that. One guy made this video from his tiny no-amenities kitchen, where he "baked" his biscuits in a covered pan on a hot-plate because he didn't have an oven. And then in the comments, another guy commented "these biscuits puffed up like chapattis! They were not crunchy! What am I doing wrong?" And it sparked this brief, friendly conversation between the two guys about making tea biscuits.
Things I have looked up on Wikipedia tonight as a result of this youtube adventure:
-biscuit
-crisco
-fully hydrogenated vegetable oil
-Boone county, WV
-Buttermilk
-non-dairy buttermilk
-lactic acid
-maida flour (tapioca starch)
-dalda (hydrogenated veggie oil sold in india)
The internet is such a win. There's something so hopeful to me about the way it's becoming this repository of the grandest ideas and the smallest factoids. All these fat old southern ladies with appliquéd sweatshirts and long fingernails and permed hair in their chintzy kitchens, making buttermilk biscuits by hand, mixing the dough and adding milk until it "feels right". You should see them push that dough around. It's the weirdest thing--they hardly touch it. They just sort of nudge at it for a while and then suddenly it's dough. Mysterious. Anyway, my point is, it moves me that I can have access to all of this. There's simultaneously this great huge philosophical punch to it and also this sweet, everyday intimacy. Dunno. I love the internet, is I guess what I'm saying.
ETA: if anyone wants to make vegan biscuits that smell like but don't really taste like coconut, here is what I did:
- 2 cups white all-purpose flour
- 3 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup room-temperature coconut oil
- 1 1/4 cup soy milk
Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.
Sift all the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder) together in a bowl. Add the coconut oil and cut it in with a pastry cutter OR pull it apart with your fingers (this is how I did it 'cause that's how my mom taught me to make pie crust) until it’s in small enough crumbly pieces that it kind of vanishes into the dry ingredients, and you have a weird greasy mealy flour mixture. Add the milk and stir it in to make a sticky dough. Plop dough onto a well-floured surface and knead gently a few times. Roll dough to half an inch thick and cut out circles with a glass. Place biscuits on a cookie sheet. Bake in preheated oven for 10-15 minutes.
THINGS I MAY DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME:
- if I can find cake flour I might try it with that, to see what they're like with a less glutinous flour
- higher temp oven; slightly less milk; shorter baking time?
- crisco instead of coconut oil, though honestly these were terrific as is.
I didn't go to work on Weds (took the half-day off), and they give us Friday off too, so it's like five whole days of NO WORK! And I'm enjoying the hell out of myself so far.
Today I ran errands and then this evening I was reading one of my crafting blogs -- a blog I especially like because the girl who writes it posted a free pattern for a stuffed sting ray that I recently made and adored -- and she posted a recipe for biscuits. And I thought, hey, I can make those vegan! So I did. I used coconut oil because I don't have crisco in the house, and soy milk. God, they're good. Mister Smarty-Pants and I kind of injured ourselves on them.
While recovering from biscuit-making, it occurred to me that there must be like 100,000 videos on youtube featuring people making biscuits! And that would be fun to see! So I did a search for "making biscuits" but it turns out that Cute Overload has forever changed the meaning of that term because all the results were videos of kittens kneading at the air. That's called "making biscuits" I guess. Cute! But not what I was looking for.
"Baking biscuits" yields better results--many videos that dutiful sons have taken of their old, fat, southern moms making biscuits. They scoop the crisco out of the can with their fingers. It is awesome.
And then I found an equally fascinating parallel universe of videos of Indian cooks making tea biscuits with nearly the same ingredients, but, like, tapioca starch instead of flour and other things like that. One guy made this video from his tiny no-amenities kitchen, where he "baked" his biscuits in a covered pan on a hot-plate because he didn't have an oven. And then in the comments, another guy commented "these biscuits puffed up like chapattis! They were not crunchy! What am I doing wrong?" And it sparked this brief, friendly conversation between the two guys about making tea biscuits.
Things I have looked up on Wikipedia tonight as a result of this youtube adventure:
-biscuit
-crisco
-fully hydrogenated vegetable oil
-Boone county, WV
-Buttermilk
-non-dairy buttermilk
-lactic acid
-maida flour (tapioca starch)
-dalda (hydrogenated veggie oil sold in india)
The internet is such a win. There's something so hopeful to me about the way it's becoming this repository of the grandest ideas and the smallest factoids. All these fat old southern ladies with appliquéd sweatshirts and long fingernails and permed hair in their chintzy kitchens, making buttermilk biscuits by hand, mixing the dough and adding milk until it "feels right". You should see them push that dough around. It's the weirdest thing--they hardly touch it. They just sort of nudge at it for a while and then suddenly it's dough. Mysterious. Anyway, my point is, it moves me that I can have access to all of this. There's simultaneously this great huge philosophical punch to it and also this sweet, everyday intimacy. Dunno. I love the internet, is I guess what I'm saying.
ETA: if anyone wants to make vegan biscuits that smell like but don't really taste like coconut, here is what I did:
- 2 cups white all-purpose flour
- 3 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup room-temperature coconut oil
- 1 1/4 cup soy milk
Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.
Sift all the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder) together in a bowl. Add the coconut oil and cut it in with a pastry cutter OR pull it apart with your fingers (this is how I did it 'cause that's how my mom taught me to make pie crust) until it’s in small enough crumbly pieces that it kind of vanishes into the dry ingredients, and you have a weird greasy mealy flour mixture. Add the milk and stir it in to make a sticky dough. Plop dough onto a well-floured surface and knead gently a few times. Roll dough to half an inch thick and cut out circles with a glass. Place biscuits on a cookie sheet. Bake in preheated oven for 10-15 minutes.
THINGS I MAY DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME:
- if I can find cake flour I might try it with that, to see what they're like with a less glutinous flour
- higher temp oven; slightly less milk; shorter baking time?
- crisco instead of coconut oil, though honestly these were terrific as is.
