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Southern biscuit flour8/13/2023 ![]() “We had to make our own flour blend, and I spent probably nine months working on it, trying to get the right amount of protein.” I couldn’t get it commercially, even,” she told me. According to Sarah Simmons, a chef from South Carolina who has owned food businesses in both New York and the South, finding soft wheat flour north of Washington, D.C., is tricky even for pros. I’m great at buying things! Unfortunately, the problem was a little more complicated. Northern biscuits suck because they are made with bread flour.Īt first, this information felt like a huge relief. If you want to make bread, you want a hard wheat. “Hard wheats are higher in gluten protein, and when they’re turned into a dough, the dough is very strong and elastic and can trap carbon dioxide,” says Phillips. ![]() “It has less gluten protein and the gluten is weaker, which allows the chemical leavening-the baking powder-to generate carbon dioxide and make it rise up in the oven.” It turns out that in most of the U.S., commonly available flours are made from hard wheats, which serve a different purpose. To make a good biscuit, “you want a flour made from a soft wheat,” he says. The one ingredient I took for granted had indeed been the key all along, says Robert Dixon Phillips, a retired professor of food science at the University of Georgia. Out of ideas, I did what any self-respecting Millennial would do: I Googled it, and then I called my mom, and then I placed an Amazon order. The only thing left was the flour, but I figured it couldn’t be that-wasn’t self-rising flour the same everywhere? We had just used regular grocery-store flour back home. I kneaded the dough more or less, made it wetter or drier. I made sure all of my ingredients were ice-cold when I started mixing, which is a good tip in general, but did not fix my problem. I tried different fat sources, including butter and lard, which made small differences in flavor and texture but still resulted in a shape and density better suited for a hockey rink than a plate. I worried about buttermilk quality, so I bought an expensive bottle at the farmers’ market, which did nothing. In subsequent attempts, I tried everything I could think of to get it right. What kind of southerner can’t make biscuits? Not to be dramatic, but my failure destabilized my identity a little bit. The result: biscuits that were just as terrible as all the other ones in New York. Confident that I could pull it off, I marched right out and bought the ingredients. I’m not an accomplished baker, but I cook frequently, and this was the kind of recipe that had long been used by people without a lot of money, advanced kitchen tools, or fancy ingredients. I asked my mom to email me the recipe, and it was three ingredients (self-rising flour, shortening, and buttermilk), mashed together with a fork. ![]() ![]() I did not anticipate the hurdles of chemistry and the American food-distribution system that stood in my way. The more bad biscuits I ordered in New York, the clearer it became that there was only one way out of this problem if I ever wanted to have a decent Sunday breakfast again: I had to make the biscuits for myself. The recipe she used had been on my dad’s side of the family for at least three generations. Even my mom, a reluctant-at-best cook, made them every week without batting an eyelash. I didn’t even realize biscuits could be bad, given how abundant good ones were in the South. With every dense, dry, flat, scone-adjacent clump of carbohydrates, I became more distressed. I arrived in the city in 2011, just in time for southern food to get trendy outside its region, and for three years, I bit into a series of artisanal hockey pucks, all advertised on menus as authentic southern buttermilk biscuits. Then I moved to New York, never to see a light, fluffy biscuit again. For 25 years in Georgia, I watched my mom make the same batch of six light, fluffy biscuits for breakfast almost every Sunday. ![]()
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