- Merrill
This week, I'm embarking upon a three-week series on yeast-free bread recipes. Popular wisdom holds that you are either a baker or a cook. Very few people are both; Amanda is one of these few, but I am not. It's not that I'm totally incompetent as a baker, but it's certainly not my forte, and when forced to roll out dough or rely on yeast, I start to sweat a little.
Strangely, my adventures in cooking began with bread -- specifically a couple of quick bread recipes from the Joy of Cooking (more on that later). And throughout my life as a cook, I've gravitated to bread recipes, like those first forays, that do not involve yeast or rising of any kind.
Today, I'm sharing one such recipe for what are quite simply the best biscuits I have ever had. According to Marion Cunningham, author of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, this recipe was taught to her at one of James Beard’s summer cooking classes in Seaside, Oregon. Instead of buttermilk or regular milk, they call for heavy cream, which keeps them from being even remotely dry. And more great news for non-bakers like me: the recipe is completely forgiving. You knead the dough before shaping it, but the resulting biscuits are as tender as could be. Maybe it's all that cream...
Cream Biscuits
Adapted from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (13th Edition) by Marion Cunningham
Makes 12 biscuits
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon sugarÂ
- 1 to 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
- Melted butter
1. Heat the oven to 425°F. Combine the flour, salt, baking powder and sugar in a mixing bowl, stirring with a fork to blend.
2. Slowly add the cream to the dry ingredients, stirring constantly, until the dough holds together. Knead gently on a lightly floured surface for about 1 minute. Pat it into 1/2-inch thick round and use a sharp knife to it cut into 8 wedges.
3. Arrange the wedges 2 inches apart on an ungreased baking sheet and brush the tops of the biscuits with melted butter. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until lightly browned. Serve warm with plenty of butter and/or honey.
A New Way to Dinner, co-authored by Food52's founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, is an indispensable playbook for stress-free meal-planning (hint: cook foundational dishes on the weekend and mix and match ‘em through the week).
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Notes:
Cutting in 1 quarter to 1 half stick of butter, as @ShoeboxKitchen, mentioned makes them flakier and all the better. Just break off small chunks of butter and smash each one into a handful of the dry ingredients. Triangle, square, any shape you want work nicely and, if the dough is too wet, you can make drop biscuits which turn out wonderfully craggy.
Due to cow dairy and wheat intolerances in the family, I use spelt flour in place of the all-purpose flour and canned evaporated goat milk for the cream. The substitutions work perfectly, maybe even better than the originals.
Thanks for turning me on to these! They're definitely my go-to biscuits from here on out.
Marion Cunningham is a true treasure. Her first revision of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook, which was still available in paperback, is my favorite basic cookbook, and I always sneak a copy into whatever present I am sending a new bride or someone getting his or her first apartment. If there were only two cookbooks in the world, I would hope they would be that one and Marcella's Essentials (although I would not be willing to part with the two books that were consolidated into this one).
I enjoyed this year's Piglet very much and would have gone to the Piglet Party if I didn't have tickets to see Chanticleer at The Metropolitan Museum. Their performance in front of the Angel Tree starts the Christmas season for me every year.
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