Biscuit

For large parties, it’s useful to have a repertoire of easy hors d’oeuvres that guests can enjoy standing up, with no plate or silverware. Winery chef Tom Sixsmith developed these tender biscuits for the wine and food program at our Visitors Center, where guests can sample appetizers designed to complement our wines. The toasted walnuts in these savory biscuits and the blue cheese butter inside help soften the tannins in our robust hillside Cabernet Sauvignon. To save time, we make the biscuit dough in large batches, cut out the biscuits, and freeze them unbaked. Then we bring them to room temperature and bake them as needed so our guests have warm, buttery biscuits with their red wine. You could also serve them as an accompaniment to a green salad or a vegetable soup.

USING ROASTED PARSNIP PUREE as a base and adding a few fresh herbs results in rich but still light and flavorful biscuits.

I’ve given an American Southern staple an Italian spin with the addition of Parmesan. The cornmeal makes these biscuits sturdy enough to pack on a picnic, and you can stuff them with smoked salmon (my fave), sliced turkey or ham, or even grilled veggies. Hot out of the oven, they are pretty terrific with just a bit of lemon butter.

This is my cross-cultural take on a frequently served Swedish snack. If you’re making the North African mantecaos specifically for this dish, you might omit the cumin, but I think they’re more interesting with it. You can also make these with standard biscuits, in which case they’re pretty simple.

These biscuits take me back to my days at The Bag Lady. I would put a couple of these in each lunch container for an extra treat! They are wonderful.

These biscuits have become one of our signature items at The Lady & Sons Restaurant. Everyone really looks forward to us bringing them out, whether it be after they are seated or while they are waiting in line.

With the airiness of dinner rolls and the flaky, buttery layers of traditional biscuits, angel biscuits—which get their extra lift from a little yeast—truly deserve their celestial name. I add chopped watercress for its mild peppery flavor and a pop of color.

Growing up, my sister, Judy, and I coveted one simple dish above all others for breakfast: hot biscuits topped with lightly mashed strawberries and lots of sweet butter. I use a dead-simple recipe for cream biscuits adapted here from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

As anyone who has actually made biscuits from scratch will tell you, they are fast and oh-so-easy—no culinary wizardry required. Of course, you needn’t go out of your way to divulge that fact when serving these rich, flaky biscuits to a chorus of oohs and ahhs. Sometimes, certain things are better left unsaid. Serve warm with lots of sweet butter, honey, molasses, or jam.

These are everything a good buttermilk biscuit should be: light, flaky, and exceedingly tender. They make appearances all over the menu at Bar Americain; they’re a fought-over item in our bread basket, the basis of Miss Stephanie’s Biscuits and Cream Gravy (page 223), and when I’m not feeling the waffles, the perfect accompaniment for fried chicken (page 131). A liberal dusting of black pepper gives the biscuits a subtle flush of heat that distinguishes them from the rest. The purists among you can leave out this last step if you prefer your biscuits free of adornment—they’re still melt-in-your-mouth good.

Cooked sweet potato adds body and flavor to these biscuits, but they are more savory than sweet—just right for buttering and sopping up gravy of any kind. Try them with Not Really Son-of-a-Bitch Stew (page 221), Tom Perini’s Chicken-fried Steak (page 227), or Beer-braised Short Ribs (page 222).

These biscuits take me back to my days at The Bag Lady, I would put a couple of these in each lunch container for an extra treat! They are wonderful.

This bread is wonderful served along with our Baked Spaghetti (see page 76) and a fresh salad.

James Beard’s excellent biscuit recipe can hardly be improved upon. But by using sour cream in the recipe, we feel the biscuits are a little creamier. If you prefer the original Beard biscuits, just omit the sour cream and double the heavy cream.

I’ve set myself up by staking a claim to the best biscuits ever. But when I made these biscuits, I was so astonished by their flavor and texture that I decided there couldn’t possibly be a more perfect biscuit—at least not any that I’ve ever tasted. Be forewarned, a generous amount of butter is a key ingredient here, so these biscuits are not for those who are squeamish about fat! That said, if you find these biscuits to be too rich, feel free to use low-fat buttermilk instead of cream for the liquid. Some people insist that only shortening has enough pure fat in it to make a flaky biscuit. While lard and shortening do contain 100 percent fat to butter’s mere 85 percent, there’s nothing to match butter when it comes to flavor. Also, I find that biscuits made with shortening sometimes have a waxy aftertaste. If you insist on using shortening, chill it for 1 hour before cutting it into the dough, and reduce the amount by about 15 percent, to 7 tablespoons (3.5 oz / 99 g). I have heard it said that there are two types of people in the world, those who like tender biscuits and those who like flaky biscuits. (I’m usually in the flaky camp.) In this recipe, I’ve replaced the traditional buttermilk with cream, which essentially makes this both a cream biscuit (and therefore tender) and a flaky biscuit. If you wonder how I arrived at this idea, it was one of those aha/duh moments, in this case brought about because I had forgotten to buy buttermilk. Discovering that I had some heavy cream on hand, I realized that there was no rule prohibiting me from trying to bring the best of both worlds together. I learned a new trick for incorporating the butter into the flour from a few of my excellent recipe testers: Freeze the butter, then use the large holes on a cheese grater to grate it directly into the dry ingredients (or use the grater attachment on a food processor, with the dry ingredients in the bowl below). Not only does this method save time, but it creates the perfect size butter pieces for the biscuits. You can use this method when making pie dough too!

My contribution to my family’s Thanksgiving meal has always been cornbread. In making it so many times, I discovered that it’s a great vehicle for fruit, cooked grains, or vegetables. This variation has a thick batter, so these are more like biscuits than bread. Pale orange and scarlet-flecked, these biscuits make a beautiful addition to a holiday table.

Start this recipe the night before serving it so that the lavender can soak in the cream and impart a strong flavor. Use fresh or dried lavender, but stay away from ornamental lavender, which is usually treated with pesticides. If you prefer, substitute peaches or nectarines for the apricots.

Forget fancy gènoise or sponge cake; in the South, a shortcake is really just a sweet biscuit. Granted, this recipe is a step above, flavored with orange zest and sprinkled with raw sugar that sparkles like amber on the golden tops. At Martha Stewart Living Television, we served miniature versions of these buttery brown sugar shortcakes filled with peaches, strawberries, and blueberries at a luncheon attended by President Clinton.