Biscuits 2: Sour Cream

Ever on the trail of things The Engineer and I can enjoy doing together, 2015 is the year we make biscuits using a new recipe every week with this cookbook as our roadmap.

We started on New Year’s Day with sturdy dorm biscuits, and yesterday it was sour cream biscuits, cooked to enjoy with our friends who spent the weekend with us atop this mountain. You know, kneading biscuit dough is a good arms workout . . . especially when the recipe calls for 2.25 cups of self-rising flour but I use 3 cups because
I am distracted by talking to our friends. That’s my reason, and I’m sticking to it . . . even though I feel like I’m bumbling my way through this biscuit making adventure.

I just kept adding sour cream by the unmeasured blob until the dough was clumpy, then I kneaded till it was smooth and made a nice enough coherent ball.

I remember my grandmother cutting her biscuits out with a glass top dipped in flour. Best I can recall, it was a jelly glass. Though I don’t have the glass Grandmother used, it was still quite satisfying to dip the glass in flour, then press it into the dough, twisting it first one way and then the other to completely separate and define the circle.

Did you know that if the bottoms brown too quickly, you can simply slide another baking pan underneath it to retard the browning? Neither did I . . . until this morning.

These biscuits were hard – not crisp, but hard – tiptoeing up on delicious anyway, something helped along by the addition of condiments like Moonshine Jelly and Carolina Peach Preserves and – wait for it – Toe Jam. I think the hardness comes from leaving the biscuits in the oven longer than the recipe called for to get them to brown. I still think it’s an altitude thing.

But hey, they look like biscuits, and I’m tickled pink about that.

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This morning, what to my wandering eyes should appear, but buttered sugared biscuits made by The Engineer using the leftover biscuits. Made just like Grandmother used to make. And that, my friends, is true love.

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Using the heirloom bread bowl, I’m kneading my matriarchal lineage in 2015 (and learning something new with The Engineer), one biscuit at a time.

It all started here.