Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Biscuit? Pancake?

**This is not a gluten-free recipe and was posted before I eliminated gluten from my diet.**

Whole wheat buttermilk biscuits, adapted from Bakewise by Shirley Corriher
Katie sent me a biscuit recipe, and I've been dying to try it. Originally I was going to substitute whole wheat pastry flour for the white flour, but otherwise follow the recipe exactly. But I have a real problem following recipes and decided that I should try to improvise with the stuff I already had in the kitchen. Here's what I ended up doing:

Buttermilk Bisquit/Pancake (adapted from "BakeWise" by Shirley Corriher)

1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour, 3/4 tsp baking powder, and 1/4 tsp salt mixed together (instead of self-rising Southern flour)
1 Tbsp raw sugar
1/8 tsp (3/4 g) salt
1 Tbsp shortening
3 Tbsp half-and-half (instead of cream)
1/3 cup milk mixed with 1 tsp lemon juice (instead of buttermilk)
1/4 cup extra whole wheat pastry flour

I mixed the flour mixture, sugar, and salt. Then I mixed the shortening in with my fingers until the lumps were gone. I stirred in the half-and-half, and then added a little bit of the "buttermilk" until it resembled cottage cheese (I only ended up using about half of it). At this point you were supposed to spoon the mix into a plate of extra flour, coat it, and form biscuits. I spooned some into the flour and ended up with a huge mess. So, I added the extra flour to the mix, poured it into a pie pan, and baked it at 425 until it was cooked through and the edges were browned (I think it took about 15 min??).

I originally thought that all of my substitutions screwed things up, but now Katie tells me that she had the same problem. It tastes delicious, though! I'll have to mess around with this to figure out how to make things that actually look like biscuits. My mouth and stomach will be happy to take care of many experiments until I get it right :).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My experience was a little different, though the result incredibly
similar. I was able to spoon tablespoons into the flour and pat them
into balls coated with flour. And I lined them up - right next to each
other - in the cake pan as was recommended "to help them expand up
instead of out." But the baked right into each other, just with
serrations in between. So coming out of the oven it was like a giant
cake of biscuits! I added all of my buttermilk... but it sounded like
depending on your flour's content, the amount might differ widely.
Would it be possible that white flour would be better at coating?
Anyway, glad they were delicious! I need to get some whole wheat
pastry flour to try them with! -Katie

Katie said...

I'm sure that substituting the whole wheat flour affected the results. It has a similar protein content to southern flour, but there are many other differences between the two. I think that part of my liquid problem was due to my substitution of half-and-half for cream. I figured that 3 Tbsp wouldn't make that much of a difference, but with a small total volume, I think I was wrong. It will definitely be fun to play around with it!

Oh, and whole wheat pastry flour is great for cakes and cookies! They turn out light and fluffy without much experimentation. I'm a big fan.