Sean Whitton: Southern Biscuits with British ingredients

I miss the US more and more, and have recently been trying to perfect Southern
Biscuits using British ingredients. It took me eight or nine tries before I
was consistently getting good results. Here is my recipe.

Ingredients

• 190g plain flour
• 60g strong white bread flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp cream of tartar (optional)
• 1 tsp salt
• 100g unsalted butter
• 180ml buttermilk, chilled
  • If your buttermilk is thicker than the consistency of ordinary milk,
    you’ll need around 200ml.
• extra buttermilk for brushing

Method

1. Slice and then chill the butter in the freezer for at least fifteen
   minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 220°C with the fan turned off.
3. Twice sieve together the flours, leaveners and salt. Some salt may not go
   through the sieve; just tip it back into the bowl.
4. Cut cold butter slices into the flour with a pastry blender until the
   mixture resembles coarse crumbs: some small lumps of fat remaining is
   desirable. In particular, the fine crumbs you are looking for when making
   British scones are not wanted here. Rubbing in with fingertips just won’t
   do; biscuits demand keeping things cold even more than shortcrust pastry
   does.
5. Make a well in the centre, pour in the buttermilk, and stir with a metal
   spoon until the dough comes together and pulls away from the sides of the
   bowl. Avoid overmixing, but I’ve found that so long as the ingredients are
   cold, you don’t have to be too gentle at this stage and can make sure all
   the crumbs are mixed in.
6. Flour your hands, turn dough onto a floured work surface, and pat together
   into a rectangle. Some suggest dusting the top of the dough with flour,
   too, here.
7. Fold the dough in half, then gather any crumbs and pat it back into the
   same shape. Turn ninety degrees and do the same again, until you have
   completed a total of eight folds, two in each cardinal direction. The
   dough should now be a little springy.
8. Roll to about ½ inch thick.
9. Cut out biscuits. If using a round cutter, do not twist it, as that seals
   the edges of the biscuits and so spoils the layering.
10. Transfer to a baking sheet, placed close together (helps them rise).
    Flour your thumb and use it to press an indent into the top of each
    biscuit (helps them rise straight), brush with buttermilk.
11. Bake until flaky and golden brown: about fifteen minutes.

Gravy

It turns out that the “pepper gravy” that one commonly has with biscuits is
just a white/béchamel sauce made with lots of black pepper. I haven’t got a
recipe I really like for this yet. Better is a “sausage gravy”; again this
has a white sauce as its base, I believe. I have a vegetarian recipe for this
to try at some point.

Variations

• These biscuits do come out fluffy but not so flaky. For that you can try
  using lard instead of butter, if you’re not vegetarian (vegetable shortening
  is hard to find here).
• If you don’t have a pastry blender and don’t want to buy one you can try not
  slicing the butter and instead coarsely grating it into the flour out of the
  freezer.
• An alternative to folding is cutting and piling the layers.
• You can try rolling out to 1–1½ inches thick.
• Instead of cutting out biscuits you can just slice the whole piece of dough
  into equal pieces. An advantage of this is that you don’t have to re-roll,
  which latter also spoils the layering.
• Instead of brushing with buttermilk, you can take them out after they’ve
  started to rise but before they’ve browned, brush them with melted butter
  and put them back in.

Notes

• I’ve had more success with Dale Farm’s buttermilk than Sainsbury’s own. The
  former is much runnier.
• Southern culture calls for biscuits to be made the size of cat’s heads.
• Bleached flour is apparently usual in the South, but is illegal(!) here.
  Apparently bleaching can have some effect on the development of the gluten
  which would affect the texture.

• British plain flour is made from soft wheat and has a lower percentage of
  protein/gluten, while American all-purpose flour is often(?) made from
  harder wheat and has more protein. In this recipe I mix plain and strong
  white flour, in a ratio of 3:1, to emulate American all-purpose flour.

  I am not sure why this works best. In the South they have soft wheats too,
  and lower protein percentages. The famous White Lily flour is 9%.
  (Apparently you can mix US cake flour and US all-purpose flour in a ratio of
  1:1 to achieve that; in the UK, Shipton Mill sell a “soft cake and pastry
  flour” which has been recommended to me as similar.)

  This would suggest that British plain flour ought to be closer to Southern
  flour than the standard flour available in most of the US. But my
  experience has been that the biscuits taste better with the plain and strong
  white 3:1 mix. Possibly Southeners would disprefer them. I got some
  feedback that good biscuits are about texture and moistness and not flavour.

• Baking powder in the US is usually double-acting but ours is always
  single-acting, so we need double quantities of that.