Pp. 638-39: Buttermilk Biscuits

I have something of a confession to make: I love KFC’s biscuits.  I, on occasion, also love KFC’s chicken, but I always love their biscuits.  They inhabit this middle ground between denseness and flakiness that both crisps on your tongue while giving you a nice, doughy bite of bread.  Store-bought biscuits are no competition in texture or taste.  I’ve tried once before to make biscuits from scratch, but the recipe had a fair amount of baking powder in it, making the biscuits taste metallic.  Any other biscuit I’ve made has come through the assistance of Bisquick, which can hardly be called “from scratch.”  Yet it seems to me that such a simple bread product shouldn’t be so difficult to make without using a processed mix.  Turns out, it isn’t.

I had some buttermilk leftover from making pancakes, so I decided to give biscuits another try.  I broke out my avocado masher (okay, it’s a pastry cutter, but it’s also perfect for mashing avocados, which I do far more frequently than I cut pastry) and set to cutting in bits of butter with flower, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Next came the buttermilk, a quick stir to incorporate it, and quick knead.  You know what I love?  The feeling of dough coming together.  You start out with disparate ingredients that seem like they’ll never come together – there’s always that extra bit of flour that you think will be left behind in the bowl – and after a few pushes, a few pulls, you have a smooth, beautiful ball of dough. 

I remember the biscuit episode of Good Eats where Alton explains that his never knew why his grandmother’s biscuits were always so much lighter and flakier than his own until he realized that it was the arthritis-owing light touch she gave the dough when spreading it out.  





With this in mind, I simply patted out the dough to the requisite ¼” thickness instead of rolling it out as directed.  The recipe states that it makes twenty-four 1½” biscuits, so I used my smallest biscuit cutter, also remembering Alton saying to press straight down and not twist the cutter, and cut out just that many.  The tops got a light brushing of sweet, melted butter.

After a ten minute bake, something wonderful happened.  Light, flaky, buttery biscuits came out.  You could see the layers as they puffed and pulled apart from each other.  And the taste?  Well, not quite KFC, but having (I assume) significantly less salt, butter, and, possibly, animal fat, they could easily stand on their own.  They were certainly better than any packaged biscuit I’ve heated up, had a better texture than the Bisquick-aided ones, and they tasted nothing like the aluminum flavored pucks I made on my first go-around.  What I would change in this recipe is the size and thickness of the biscuit.  Next time I’ll go for at least a ½” thickness and a 3” diameter to more closely resemble a normal biscuit.  While the tiny ones I made were cute and perfect for an appetizer biscuit sandwich or something of that ilk, something that could hold a bit of egg and some cheese would be quite nice.  But, other than the size, these were easy and fabulous tasting.  I will never buy packaged biscuits again.

Ingredient Comparison

Here I compare my biscuits to your typical Pillsbury can o’ biscuits, the kind where you pulled back the wrapper and held your breath waiting for the pop to surprise you because it did every time.  There will be times where I use somewhat processed ingredients, so in the interest of honesty I’ll include the additional ingredients in italics underneath the main ingredient.  I’ve done that with the buttermilk here (I’m certainly not about to start churning my own butter for the buttermilk). 

My Buttermilk Biscuits unbleached all-purpose flour baking powder baking soda salt unsalted butter cultured lowfat buttermilk cultured lowfat milk nonfat milk salt sodium citrate vitamin A palmitate

Pillsbury Grands Homestyle Buttermilk Biscuits enriched flour bleached water partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oil sugar baking powder dextrose salt whey xanthan gum natural and artificial flavor

Pp. 807 & 853: Vanilla Pudding with Blackberry Coulis

I have issues with pudding.  I find the texture in your typical pudding cup to be extremely off-putting, no doubt related to an unfortunate childhood incident with yogurt that ruined a lot of creamy substances for me.  Despite my hatred of pudding cups, I do still fine the powdered pudding you combine with milk to be palatable.  The difference is in the consistency – the pudding mix renders a firmer, heartier product, while the pudding cups are just soft, glutinous goop.  I recently bought a small cookbook filled with miniature versions of desserts that I find irresistibly cute, but the problem is that several of the tasty-looking desserts require using pudding, whether as a layer over cake or as a base topped with fruit.  Remembering that the box pudding was tolerable, I thought that homemade pudding must be even better.  But when was the last time you had pudding make from scratch?  Isn’t it just one of those things that’s born in a box or a cup?

The Joy proffered a simple enough recipe for vanilla pudding.  A few pages later I found the recipe for several types of coulis, which is nothing more than a seedless, pureed, fresh fruit sauce.  With a bag of frozen blackberries languishing in my freezer, I knew I had an easy substitute for the raspberry version of the recipe.  The bag of blackberries, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice went into the blender for a spin.  I pushed the resulting puree through a sieve and threw away the seedy remainder, leaving me with a smooth, gorgeously dark red liquid that was a nice balance of both sweet and tart.

The pudding inspired a little more trepidation in me when I saw that I would have to do something I had never done before: temper an egg.  There have been a few times while making pancakes that I have failed to let the melted butter sufficiently cooling before throwing it into the rest of the batter, leaving me with a lumpy mass because the eggs have started to scramble.  I would have to go easy here if I didn’t want to end up with scrambled egg pudding. 

Into a pot went the sugar, the cornstarch, and a bit of salt.  I whisked in a small amount of milk to make into a smooth paste, similar making a roux.  Followed by more milk, the mixture was heated to a simmer while being whisked constantly.  Next came the egg.  I beat 1 egg in a small bowl and added a small amount of the thickened mixture, stirring it thoroughly, then poured that mixture back into the pot.  The glorious, pale yellow, French vanilla-like color was an unexpected sight.  The mixture was cooked for another full minute before a small amount of vanilla extract was added.  Following the general pudding instructions to not let the mixture cool, I immediately poured this into martini glasses and covered them with plastic wrap before putting them in the refrigerator.  The few licks of the hot mixture I took from the spatula were full of vanilla flavor and custard-like in texture – it was satisfyingly thick, not like pudding cups at all.  I couldn’t wait to taste the cooled, finished product.

In the end, pairing the coulis with the pudding wasn’t the best idea.  Together, the blackberries overwhelmed the vanilla and I couldn’t taste much of the pudding at all.  But, on their own, they were simple and fantastic, tasting heavily of their individual ingredients.  The blackberry sauce may have been too much with the pudding, but I can easily imagine it spooned over a thick piece of pound cake.   The pudding proved to be quite easy to prepare, despite my anxiety over the egg, and it tasted purely of vanilla goodness.  It certainly wasn’t much more difficult than stirring milk into a boxed powder.  Why we don’t make it anymore is a mystery to me.

Ingredient Comparison

I’ve always been interested in cooking, but something that has recently aroused my drive is the desire to cut back on the amount of processed foods I consume.  I’ll be the first to admit that I highly enjoy frozen pizza (and not the healthy organic kind but the kind that you can pick up for $3 on sale) and I totally use bottled pasta sauce and find canned broth the paramount of convenience, so this isn’t a holier-than-thou proclamation.  It’s simply the knowledge that I can’t control the ingredients in foods I don’t prepare myself, but I can in the foods I do.  As I watch people in my family suffer from certain diet-influenced diseases, this is something over which I increasingly want to maintain my command.  So, when able, I’ll post side-by-side lists of the ingredients I used in my recipes and the ingredients in the typical store-bought item for a comparison of what I’m truly consuming. 

Here I compared my pudding to the boxed mix that I would actually buy (as opposed to the pudding cups), so you would also need to add whatever milk you normally use.  I haven’t included a comparable blackberry sauce because I’m not familiar with a prepared form – it’s not preserves, a syrup, or a jelly.  It’s one of those things you can really only get when you make it yourself.

My Vanilla Pudding sugar cornstarch salt skim milk egg organic vanilla extract* My Blackberry Coulis frozen blackberries sugar lemon juice

Jell-O Vanilla Instant Pudding & Pie Filling sugar modified cornstarch natural & artificial flavor salt disodium phosphate tetrasodium phosphate mono- & diglycerides artificial color yellow 5 yellow 6 BHA [milk]

*I use organic vanilla extract because its ingredients are alcohol, water, and vanilla.  Regular vanilla extract also includes corn syrup.  Check the label on your bottle.

An Introduction

Yesterday I went to the Green City Market for the first time.  Yes, despite living a short bus ride away for several years, I’d never taken the trip to the most renowned farmers market in Chicago.  Call it a slave to convenience (my Jewel is two blocks away) or call it resistance to trying new things, but I never took the time to explore the market even though I was perennially curious about it.  While there, I took the opportunity to view screening of Lunch Line, a documentary about school lunches that was both heartening in its championing of a turn away from nutrient-based meals to food-based meals and disheartening in the amount of bureaucracy tied up with something as simple as lunch.  It was a well done film, following a group of Tilden Academy students on their journey to Cooking up Change in Washington, D.C., discussing the history and development of the school lunch program, and talking to people who were trying to enact change in the way we think about food and nutrition.  If you’re at all piqued by the upcoming second season of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, you should also take a look at this film.

The market is still in its indoor phase, but it offered a nice array of cheeses, jams and preserves, apples, breads, and some fresh meats.  The offerings weren’t quite to my tastes – I wasn’t looking for pre-made items and I don’t really enjoy apples unless they’re baked in something and I didn’t have a craving for that at the time – so I just picked up some potatoes, which I decide to mash up with a couple turnips and eat with some turkey meatloaf.  The meatloaf was good, as usual (I always use Cinnamon's recipe), but the mashed potatoes and turnips weren’t the best thing I ever made.  I love the texture I get from using my potato ricer, but the cooked turnips wouldn’t go through the holes.  All that happened when I squeezed the handle was some watery juices squirted out and I was left with a hardened, fibrous mass at the bottom of the cup.  The taste wasn’t spectacular either, so I don’t think I’ll be trying that one again anytime soon.

I was a little disappointed with the lack of bounty I’d brought home as earlier in the week I had perused my copy of Joy of Cooking and spied a recipe for homemade vanilla pudding that I thought would be great topped with a fresh berry sauce.  (I ended up making the vanilla pudding anyway, using some berries I remembered I had stashed away in my freezer.)  I’d like to say that my Joy of Cooking is an old, worn, tomato-stained copy passed down through the female generations of my family, but the truth is that it’s something I happened to pick up one day at Borders when I had a coupon that I needed to use.  I don’t recall ever seeing the book in my mother’s kitchen (an entire Time Life series is another story), but it has, however, become one of the most important cookbooks in my own kitchen.  Along with Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, it’s the book that I immediately go to when I want to find the basics of any recipe or learn about any vegetable, fruit, cut of meat, or type of dough.  I have a plethora of post-its marking pages of recipes that I plan to try one day, but, sadly, few of them have actually been tried.  The Joy’s pancakes are my go-to recipe, I’ve made a wonderful Pasta Puttanesca, and I recently turned out a fabulous crunchy, buttery, sweet cornbread, but what about the Individual Molten Chocolate Cakes and the Stuffed Bell Peppers and the Fig Compote with Lemon and Ginger?  When will those be made?

In starting this blog, what I really wanted to do was give myself some incentive to cook at least one new recipe a week and discuss its merits or shortcomings.  I quickly realized, though, that a good number of the recipes would end up coming from the Joy and the blog would seem nothing more than an endorsement of the tome.  Then I thought, why not?  Why not take this opportunity to explore one of the mothers of all cookbooks?  I could learn a hell of a lot and, if things go well, eat some really tasty food.  Don’t get me wrong, this is not an attempt to cook through the entire book in any specified amount of time – that would be 4500 recipes and that is just insane for (most nights) single, solitary me.  But, in doing this I do hope to broaden my culinary horizons, from Basic White Bread to Spicy Seafood Stew to Baked Stuffed Heart (okay, maybe not that last one), and become both a better cook and a better eater.  Plus, having just finished grad school, I'm itching for a completely new project.  I definitely plan to return to the Green City Market when it heads outside in early May and I can’t wait to flip through the Joy as I try to figure out what to do with my new finds.

So here I am, like so many of you: a 9-to-5’er, over-educated, under-stimulated, and hungry.  Here’s to trying new things and finding what truly satisfies our appetites.

I'll let you know how that vanilla pudding turned out.