Cooking Lesson #373: Double Butter Biscuits

The Thanksgiving Collection

How you doin’? This recipe incorporates secrets from several Southern chefs who love to make biscuits as part their Thanksgiving Day dinner tradition. One thing you can be sure of… they sure aren’t lacking in real butter flavor. This recipe adds one more step during prep and you’ll have to clean the food processor, but it’s well worth the effort. If you are planning to take these biscuits on a picnic you won’t have to worry about packing butter to spread on them as there is a double whammy of butter and possibly even more if you choose to brush melted butter on the tops when they come out of the oven.
 
I think you’ll find my biscuits may not be a diet food but are delicious and habit-forming. You can make them even tastier by splitting them and adding a small shot of honey to each cut half. Now, that’s gilding the lily.
 
Left over biscuits? Don’t waste ‘em! Next day, split them in half and toast them under the broiler of your oven until the middles are a light golden brown and then slather with a little boysenberry jelly. Or make them as a great breakfast feast of biscuits and gravy… you can even use that leftover gravy from last night’s turkey dinner. Yummm!
 
Where did ‘biscuits and gravy’ originate?  Biscuits and gravy in some form may go back as far as the Revolutionary War, but many food writers and culinary historians position its birthplace in Southern Appalachia in the late 1800s. Lumber was one of the main industries of the region, which supports the story that sausage gravy was also called sawmill gravy. It was the ideal cheap and calorie-dense fuel for sawmill workers lifting heavy logs all day long and the perfect tool for making the era’s biscuits more palatable. Today we need a calorie-dense breakfast to support our bodies throughout the entire Thanksgiving weekend football games we all must watch.
 
Prep time:  20 minutes
Bake time:  10 to 12 minutes
Additional time:  10 minutes
Yield:  12 servings
 
Ingredients
1/2 cup unsalted butter, plus 1/4 cup frozen butter
4 cups Bisquick Original Baking Mix, plus 1/2 cup Bisquick
1 cup lemon-lime soda (such as Sprite)
1 cup sour cream
 
Directions

1. Preheat an oven to 425⁰ F.
2. Place 1/2 cup of the butter in a 9 x 13-inch baking dish and place dish in the preheating oven until the butter is melted.
3. In a food processor, pulse the ¼ cup frozen butter with 1/2 cup of Bisquick until it looks like small pebbles or coated sand.
4. Mix 4 cups of the baking mix, lemon-lime soda and sour cream together in a separate bowl until dough holds together and is sticky.
5. Working quickly, mix the frozen dough mixture into the sour cream mixture and turn dough onto a floured work surface; roll into a 1-inch thick circle. You want to keep the frozen butter as cold as possible.
6. Cut circles out of the dough using a biscuit cutter or the rim of a glass and place them in the melted butter in the baking dish.
7. Bake in the preheated oven until biscuits are golden brown, 10 to 12 minutes.
8. Remove the baking dish from the oven and let stand until biscuits have absorbed all the butter, about 10 minutes.

Chef Secret:  The frozen butter and baking mixtures adds wonderful pockets of melted butter to the inside of each biscuit. If you want your biscuits to be even more buttery, brush the tops with a little melted butter when they come out of the oven.

Quip of the Day: “I’ll tell you a coronavirus joke now, but you’ll have to wait two weeks to see if you got it.”
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To you and everyone dear to you, be strong, be positive, stay well, stay safe and be kind. Have a wonderful safe and healthy holiday. If you have a little extra in your pockets to share with others at this difficult time, please consider donating to Feeding America. 

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                                         ©Perspectives/The Consulting Group, Inc., 2021

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