’Mouse’s Best Ever (American) Biscuits

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

2 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup shortening or lightly chilled butter
2/3 cup milk

Mix the flour, baking powder, sugar, cream of tartar and salt well in a medium bowl.  At this point you can mix the dry ingerdients all you want so as to be sure to evenly mix.

Using a pastry blender, fork or two knives, cut the shortening or butter into the flour mixture until the mixture resembles course crumbs.  Still there is no danger of over-mixing.

Next the gentle part.  Make a well in the center of the flour and add the milk, all at once.  Then, very gently pull the flour mixture into the milk just as necessary to form a soft ball of dough.  The idea is to treat the dough as gently as possible and minimize handling at this point.

As soon as it will all stick together, turn the dough ball onto a well-floured surface and very gently knead it just a couple times so the moisture is distributed and it is a proper ball of dough. 

Still very gently, pat or roll the dough to 1/2-inch thickness.  Cut with a biscuit cutter (or the top ring from one of those handy jars of jam) and gently transfer to a baking sheet. If the dough is slightly sticky, be sure to press straight down in a single motion with the cutter.  You can also flour it between cuts.

Reform the last dough scraps as needed to form the last couple biscuits, but note which ones these are—you will notice when you eat them that they are chewier and less light and flakey just from that little bit of extra handling.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until biscuits are lightly golden brown on the top and bottom.  Makes 10-12 biscuits.

Serve warm.  To eat, slice in half and top with butter and Bakerina’s jam.  In an emergency, you may use other homemade jam.

i’ll lone you a bit of my tupelo honey to drizzle over the tops…

Oh, Ms. G, the things I’d do for a little drizzle of your tupelo honey would make a stevedore blush.

I’d like to see a stevedore blush.

I had an aborted attempt at baking these over the weekend; got most of the ingredients out of the cupboard that I thought I might need, realised I had not printed the recipe (I don’t have a printer at home) and decided to give up and drink red wine instead. 

Stay tuned to this ‘biscuit’-baking channel…

Just to confirm, before I go shopping tomorrow, “all purpose flour” is the equivalent of Australian’s “plain flour”.  That’s what I recall and that’s what this dictionary tells me:

http://www.statsci.org/smyth/ozus.html

But who would be daft enough to trust websites or my memory.  Maybe we need a baking consultant on this one.  Bakerina?

No, no, no.  I definitely don’t trust that website.  Quite a lot of it is fairly good, but there are a few too many terms that are off-base:

* terms that are attributed only to the US are also used widely here in Australia (yuppie)

* meanings which vary greatly depending on where you are in Australia (schooner, midi, pot, see Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_English_terms_for_food_and_drink - I should have gone there first!)

* terms that aren’t used as suggested (quay/wharf - we use wharf and it’s saying we using quay… I mean, wharfies are a renowned phenomen!  There’s this just for a starting example:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200503/s1324156.htm
but Google has many, many other examples of Australian Wharfies.  Maybe in another state of Australia they prefer quay over wharf, but I don’t know where.

* terms that are just plain wrong (a drongo is not a bore, they’re an idiot!)

Ahem.  Please excuse this rant.  It must be all the flour in my head.  What a bunch of drongos.

Not being in Australia to compare I cannot speak authoritatively.  But I think your assumption would be correct—whatever the white flour that’s most common on the supermarket shelf, that’s the one.  If there’s one specifically labeled “bread flour” or “high gluten” don’t use that one.

That said, Bakerina mentioned on her website that she often uses 1/2 pastry flour and 1/2 all purpose in order to avoid potentially tough biscuits.  I accomplish the same thing with minimizing the handling post-wet-ingredients. 

Last bit of advice - don’t melt the butter.  Sure it seems like that would make it mix in better, but that’s not what’s intended.  It’s the cutting in of cool butter, with a couple knives or one of those multi-bladed pastry cutters to make pea-sized grainy lumpiness that’s the goal.

Thanks for the tip about the butter.  I usually use a fork for folding in butter, but I’ll try two knives and see how it goes.

If you like the biscuits and decide to make them often, then they’ll be an excuse to get a pastry blender .  A kitchen can never have enough gadgets… er, tools.

Now, that’s my sort of kitchen gadget.  I was worried you were suggesting an electric device.  I spend time in the kitchen to get my hands on some food, not press a button.  I read somewhere that you can buy, for example, an electric spice grinder.  What for?  That’s what muscles and mortar and pestle are for!

A pastry blender has now been added to my already long kitchen tool wish-list.  It’s always nice to have an excuse to buy stuff.

Now that you know what they look like, I’ll bet you start to see them all the time at garage sales or jumble sales or whatever-Australians-call-’em.  What *do* you call ‘em?

I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but I call ‘em garage sales.

And, now that I know what it is, I’m sure that I’ve seen them in garage sales from time gone by.

I’m driving myself nutty with this.  I’ve now lost my printout of the recipe (no printer at home, computer not in the kitchen).  I’ll think I’ll devote the afternoon to cheese and curries instead.

There’s a little bit of paradise jelly still left in the fridge and I’m not allowed to eat it until I’ve baked the biscuits.

Hah, hah. 

Tick.