Recipes
YE OLDE BUTTERMILK BISCUITS
Ye Olde Buttermilk Biscuits
When you're a kid, you often take things for granted. I was raised on homemade biscuits, croissants, shortcakes and various other forms of non-yeasted quick breads. This left me with a deep yearning for those fascinatingly bright shiny tubes, in the refrigeration section of the mega mart, from which biscuit dough burst forth like so much Jiffy Pop.
Ah, the magical allure of clever packaging.
My brothers and I wanted them SO bad, after all, something as cool as exploding dough in a shiny tube could only be the most bestest kind of yummy biscuit ever!! Right? Why did mom always refuse to purchase them? Could she not see how shiny the tube was? Did she not fully comprehend dough discharging from a tube was neat-o? It makes perfect sense. When your 6.
So all through my childhood years I was denied the magic of tubular dough detonation. Mom always said making biscuits didn’t take that much time so it’s not really a time saver. She didn’t get into the hydrogenated oil lecture until we were older (15) and still asking for them.
Finally, when I left home to make my way in the world, the spoils from my first grocery shopping expedition included the much coveted tube o’ biscuit dough. I believe they were either “Country Style” or “Buttermilk”. Needless to say, I peeled back the wrapper with great anticipation of the impending explosion.
Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it. Nothing happened, so I pressed on the seam and “pop”. Cool, even if a little anticlimactic, but what the heck.
I laid out the biscuits on a baking sheet and placed them in the oven, almost hopping up and down with excitement. When the bell went off, I removed them and waited for them to cool just long enough so I would not burn my fingers while trying to butter them.
Then the moment, I took a bite, all of my childhood wished being fulfilled in that very moment… Yuck!
I dumped the rest of them in the garbage can and immediately called my mother to acquire the family recipe for the buttermilk biscuits I grew up on along with her waffle recipe. I gave the Eggo’s I had bought to the neighbor without even trying them. And went hunting for a waffle iron at the Goodwill, but that’s another story.
Oh, and if you read the ingredient list on the “Southern Style” package, it begs the question. Who has Whey Protein Concentrate and Wheat Protein Isolate just lying around the kitchen to throw into their biscuit dough? Not to mention the Di-Acetyl Tartrate Ester of Monoglyceride (DATEM)?
TELL ME MORE
