I made some cheesy garlic biscuits today.
Without the use of a recipe.
I've played around sans recipes before, but it's been with easy stuff that doesn't depend on ingredient ratios being a certain way, like pasta-casserole type junk, or on single dishes that don't require a lot of thought, like sauteed chicken or scrambled eggs. So my achievement today is a pretty special one. The ability to make biscuits is like some kind of Adulthood Merit Badge in our southern subculture. Recipes for them can be unreliable because different variables, like temperature, humidity, and perhaps planet alignment, can cause the necessary ratios to change. It's one of those skills you can only really acquire through repeated trial and error rather than through study and then execution. Which, as you know, makes it pretty irksome to me. Therefore, when a person acquires this skill, it's a mark of self-discipline and hard work because those are really the only ways to learn it.
Full disclosure: I sidestepped the trial-and-error thing a little...a few months ago, I felt like making pizza because I was pretty sure I had everything I needed. So, because it was all I had in the house at the time, I looked up a recipe for pizza dough that used self-rising flour. I followed the directions and baked it up and such. It wasn't a bad pizza, certainly better than the frozen stuff, but I noticed that the crust acted more like biscuit than crust. I had basically made a giant pizza biscuit. So my biscuit knowledge didn't come from intentionally making biscuits, but rather from stumbling upon biscuits during the creation of something else altogether. All's well that ends well, I suppose.
For The Curious: A Description of How I Did It
Because I used no recipe, I have no clue about measurements here, so good luck trying to imitate me!
1. Preheat your oven to about 350 or so and gather from around the kitchen some butter, self-rising flour, milk, cheddar cheese, garlic salt,a big bowl, a glass baking dish, a fork, an ice-cream scoop, and the components of your favorite little food processor.
2. Slice off a chunk of cheese and cut it into pieces small enough to fit into your food processor (we have a very small red one that is just perfect for things like this.) If you wanna make lots of biscuits, use lots of cheese. Food-process the cheese into little cheese crumbles, so they look like little yellow swole-up grits. If you've got shredded cheese, this step is unnecessary, obvy.
3. Scoop some flour into your bowl, until the flour pile looks about half the size of the eventual dough pile you see in your imagination.
4. Using your ice-cream scoop (mine's the narrow bladey kind, not the built-in-scraper kind), plop some butter on your flour pile so that it looks like you've got one part butter to seven parts flour. Err on the side of underestimation because you can always add more. And you probably will.
5. Take your fork and start smushing the butter and flour around. You want to eventually end up with little butter-flour balls about pea size or smaller. Not all the flour has to be taken up with the butter - it's cool if there's some loose flour chilling on the sides of the bowl. If only about half your flour is taken up with the butter, add a little more butter and see if you can't get a little more in there and keep smushing.
6. Here's the part that's REALLY hard to explain - the addition of the milk. Add a little less milk than you think it will take to just barely moisten everything and stir it up with your fork. If you've still got a good bit of dry flour hanging out, add just a smidge more milk. If you see a puddle or if the dough looks really wet, there's too much milk. You can add a little flour to get it back to that just-barely-wet stage, but only a little - if you add too much, your butter ratio will get thrown off. And at this point, butter is pretty much impossible to add.
7. Once the dough is just moistened and sticking together pretty good, add your cheese and a few shakes of garlic salt (Or several. I'm not prejudiced.) Stir it all up until you've got a pretty even distribution of cheese.
8. Use some of your butter to grease your glass baking dish. I like to use a paper towel and write silly things on the dish and then pretend I'm erasing them.
9. Set aside a scoop of your flour for flouring your hands while you form the biscuits (you might want to do this on a towel or cutting board, 'cause it's messy) Flour up your hands so the dough won't stick to them, grab some handfuls of dough and pat them into little saucers. Place them about an inch or so away from each other on the baking dish - they'll grow up more than they'll grow out.
10. Put them in the oven and bake. I have no clue how long I baked them - I just kept checking them. The nice thing about the glass bakeware is that when you check the biscuits, you can crouch down, lift the dish and see whether the bottoms are toasted yet. Because for me, an undertoasted or overdone biscuit bottom is a deal-breaker.
These were pretty good - not as salty and greasy as those offered at Brightly Colored Crustacean restaurants, which for me is a plus. They were pretty big and puffy, and had some crispness about the outside and bottom and fluffy insides. Which is how I like biscuits. The kind of unique part to my method as opposed to other methods I've watched is the fork-smushing of the butter and flour, which I stole from the pizza crust recipe. My husband uses electric beaters when he makes them, which probably has to do with why his biscuits tend to look kinda swirly like meringues. Lots of people like to mix and mush with their hands - I am weirded out by this.
Emboldened by my success, I think I might try Jill Conner Browne's Chocolate Stuff recipe!
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