Being from the north and being married to someone from the south has exposed me to a regional type of food I’ve grown to love. I think of it as foods with simple ingredients with really focused flavors and excellent textures.
A great example of this is the humble breakfast biscuit. Once you’ve had a great homemade biscuit with butter and jam, you’ll remember it and never be satisfied with pale substitutes.
I admit I have a tendency to lean towards more complex recipes, believing my drive for great taste and texture in the face of alternative ingredients requires complexity – that’s true sometimes, but not always.
Great biscuit are made by the interactions among the fat, leavener, moisture and heat. And, although I’ve worked and reworked many approaches to this challenge using traditional fats and tried-and-true techniques I have had less than wonderful results. Imagine my surprise when I learned about southern cream biscuits.
This recipe has so few ingredients you would think you can’t go wrong. Counter-intuitively, because it has only flour, salt, coconut cream and baking soda, there really is nowhere to hide. The trick with this recipe isn’t precision, it’s adding just the right amount of coconut milk to the flour to produce the right texture. So starting with less liquid is better and adding as you need.
I’m sure there’s a place in my repetoire for butter-based biscuits that take more time to prepare, chill and rest. But I really like how fast and easy this recipe is.
