Touch-of-Grace Biscuits

I’m really enjoying being part of the group baking through The Bread Bible. I initially thought I might be nuts, signing up for 2 baking groups at once, but the once-a-month pace is perfect, and the results are generally things that aren’t a problem to add to our regular meals. With The Baking Bible bake-through, I have to plan out where the results are going: my work, Jay’s work, Gilad, or are we having people over? I don’t care where you go, but you can’t all stay here! This week, we had “touch of grace” biscuits with turkey noodle “stoup” for Sunday dinner.

This is a simple recipe, and you don’t need any special equipment to make it, other than a 8″ round cake pan. Probably don’t be like me, and go with something less than 3″ deep, though.

First step: make your own self-raising flour, with all purpose, cake flour, baking powder, and salt. Then, one teaspoon at a time, rub shortening into the flour.

Once that’s all “pea sized”…

Add the buttermilk (or cream, but who doesn’t like buttermilk biscuits?)…

Stir. With my dough whisk, this took maybe 15 swipes around the bowl to come together?

The dough whisk is a tool I never would have bought for myself, but I very much appreciate the gift from my Mom. I use it at least once a week (to feed my sourdough, if nothing else).

The next step, I’m not sure I did right. This is where you scoop out some of the biscuit dough, drop it in flour, dust it with more flour, then “shape” it into a round.

Er.. yeah, my biscuits weren’t round. And they kind of ran together. *Really* soft dough. Maybe I didn’t let it sit long enough?

I was hoping they’d magically look more biscuit-like after coming out of the oven.

A little, but still pretty weird. They were definitely cooked, though. The recipe says they should read 160 in the centre. If you see the little hole in the middle one above, you can see that I did stab it with the thermometer, and it read well over that. I stopped waiting for it to finish rising when it hit 180.

I realized after supper that I forgot to grab a picture of the 9 of them pulled apart on the plate. So… you get a picture of 4 of them pulled apart on a plate. 😉

Despite the weird appearance, and the lack of a significant amount of rise, these were really quite tasty, and didn’t even need butter. The texture seemed little off to me, but I have a feeling that has something to do with the shape of the pan that I used. I don’t own an 8″ round by 2″ deep pan, but feel like I probably should. My pan cupboard’s getting a little full, though, so something would have to go out the door, first.