Atomic Nerds

Continuing the theme of cooking things that I’m generally much more enthusiastic about than Stingray, eating the fabulous cat’s-head biscuits at the Longhorn cafe at Blogorado re-awakened in me a ravening craving for some of the grub I used to breakfast on when I was living in New Orleans. My other half is, as a whole, not nearly as enamored with Cajun-creole fare as I am, but as biscuits and grits are more of a general Southern theme of the overall school of “everything the American Heart Association doesn’t want you to eat”, I figured they would probably get a thumbs-up if prepared well. I felt both things were a bit too simple to get an entire post out of- especially grits, which require about one more order of skill to make than making toast in a toaster- I’d do both at once, stick Stingray with the protein for the evening, and write them both up.

I would have used Farmmom’s recipe, but I am a blushing virgin to the arcane world that is biscuits- which are a short and simple ingredient list whose results are almost entirely up to the maker’s technique- and I figured it was time to put to use the huge DVD library of Good Eats episodes we have on hand. (I gave pretty much every set ever released to Stingray as a Christmas gift one year. They’ve gone to good use.) So after I went back over that episode, here’s the recipe to use: Alton Brown’s southern biscuits.

Ingredients

* 2 cups flour
* 4 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
* 3/4 teaspoon salt
* 2 tablespoons butter
* 2 tablespoons shortening
* 1 cup buttermilk, chilled

Directions

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Using your fingertips, rub butter and shortening into dry ingredients until mixture looks like crumbs. (The faster the better, you don’t want the fats to melt.) Make a well in the center and pour in the chilled buttermilk. Stir just until the dough comes together. The dough will be very sticky.

Turn dough onto floured surface, dust top with flour and gently fold dough over on itself 5 or 6 times. Press into a 1-inch thick round. Cut out biscuits with a 2-inch cutter, being sure to push straight down through the dough. Place biscuits on baking sheet so that they just touch. Reform scrap dough, working it as little as possible and continue cutting. (Biscuits from the second pass will not be quite as light as those from the first, but hey, that’s life.)

Bake until biscuits are tall and light gold on top, 15 to 20 minutes.

For the grits, I went ahead and snagged a recipe for shrimp and grits; since they don’t combine until served, I figured Stingray could handle the seafood and I’d make the grits. Here’s the entire thing, for those of you that actually want to use the recipe rather than laugh at my flailings. Shrimp and Grits:

Ingredients

* 4 cups water
* Salt and pepper
* 1 cup stone-ground grits
* 3 tablespoons butter
* 2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
* 1 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined
* 6 slices bacon, chopped
* 4 teaspoons lemon juice
* 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
* 1 cup thinly sliced scallions
* 1 large clove garlic, minced

Directions

Bring water to a boil. Add salt and pepper. Add grits and cook until water is absorbed, about 20 to 25 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in butter and cheese.

Rinse shrimp and pat dry. Fry the bacon in a large skillet until browned; drain well. In grease, add shrimp. Cook until shrimp turn pink. Add lemon juice, chopped bacon, parsley, scallions and garlic. Saute for 3 minutes.

Spoon grits into a serving bowl. Add shrimp mixture and mix well. Serve immediately.

Since the grits procedure that I’d actually be responsible for amounted to about three steps if you count boiling the water as a separate step, and no one really minds eating room-temperature biscuits as opposed to room-temperature grits, I started with the biscuits.

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. This time, double check that this instruction is in degrees Fahrenheit. Then double check that there is nothing in the oven and all the racks are in the correct position to admit a tray of baked goods. Remove the roasting pan from the oven and proceed with your preheating.

2. Assemble your cast of characters. Mixing bowl, baking sheet, cutting board, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt. Butter and shortening and buttermilk stay in the fridge until needed. Squint worriedly at the “double action” notation on the baking powder can. Does that mean it acts as both baking powder and baking soda? The recipe didn’t say “double action”. Retire to Google to check. You still need both, you may proceed without fear that the biscuits might react like the baking soda volcano you made when you were little.

3. Explain to your chef’s knife that you are very sorry, but you won’t be needing it today, but this doesn’t mean anything, and you’ll get back together real soon. Explain to your Kitchen Bitch that we’re baking, which means no dropped peels or pieces of vegetable or fat scraps.

4. Locate your donut/biscuit cutter and attempt to remove the “hole” portion of the cutter. At this point it’s really not worth wasting time wrestling with recalcitrant kitchen gadgets like a monkey with a puzzle board; hand it to your spouse and let him deal with it with the giant Leatherman that lives on his belt. (Along with enough other hardware to conduct a successful NASA orbital mission.)

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Using your fingertips, rub butter and shortening into dry ingredients until mixture looks like crumbs. (The faster the better, you don’t want the fats to melt.)

5. Dump flour into the mixing bowl. Note that doing anything with a quantity of flour larger than a teaspoon will largely take care of flouring surfaces that need to be floured, as well as all other surfaces, you, and Kitchen Bitch. Add the other white powders. Remove the butter and shortening sticks from the fridge. Slice off about two tablespoon’s worth of butter. That’s a pretty big hunk of butter, and we’re supposed to distribute it among the dry goods until it forms very small balls surrounded by dry good. As your spouse passes you in the process of whittling chips of butter off the hunk and into the bowl with a paring knife, you’re allowed to stab him if he makes a crack about misunderstanding “cut the butter into the dough”.

6. Scoop out two tablespoons of shortening and attempt to distribute them into the dough. Now is a good time to meditate on the strange paradox that while all other fats act as lubricants even when solid, shortening in its unmelted form sticks to everyfuckingthing. Resist the urge to wash your hands again since now you have to give your fats and dry goods a massage.

7. Prod, rub, and fiddle your fats into your dough. Stop sometime in between “oh god it has chunks some of the biscuits won’t have butter and the others’ll be greasy” and “oh fuck I think it might be melting what if it’s melting”.

Make a well in the center and pour in the chilled buttermilk. Stir just until the dough comes together. The dough will be very sticky.

8. Dig a little well. Now at this point you have to reach into your clean refrigerator to get your clean bottle of buttermilk, but… we need floured hands for the step after this, and wasting this thorough coat of flour (with extra fat) would be kind of a waste. Deal with the handprints later and hope you didn’t get too many grains of flour in the buttermilk itself later. Dispense your cup of buttermilk into the well in the center.

9. Stir. Stop at some point in between “it’s mostly just powder” and “so much gluten forms that the dough refuses to give back your spoon”. Try to err on the side of too unmixed and not fret too much about unincorporated flour, because it turns out you’re going to have to cover the whole mess and everything else in about as much flour as you used for the dough just to stop it sticking.

Turn dough onto floured surface, dust top with flour and gently fold dough over on itself 5 or 6 times. Press into a 1-inch thick round.

10. Scrape the sticky-as-advertised dough onto your floured cutting board. Sprinkle the top with flour. Start pressing it into a roughly round, flat shape. Stop pressing when you realize either your right hand or the surface of that side of the dough was inadequately floured and a substantial amount of dough is now stuck to your hand and will stick most vigorously to any further dough you apply that dough to. ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

11. Sacrifice the dough bonded most thoroughly to your hand and your previous flour coat and wash it. Re-flour your hand. Cover the surface of the dough with more flour. Resume attempting to turn the thing into a roughly one-inch thick round flat shape. Briefly pause and wonder something along the lines of “wasn’t there another step?”* before shrugging and retrieving your biscuit cutter.

Place biscuits on baking sheet so that they just touch. Reform scrap dough, working it as little as possible and continue cutting.

12. Start slicing out rounds of biscuits. As you attempt to remove them from the cutting board and transfer them to the baking sheet, discover that the cutting board, despite being covered in flour, was still somehow inadequately floured. Develop a trick of twisting the biscuit cutter up and out so that the rounds come with the cutter rather than staying on the cutting board. Deposit biscuits directly from cutter to sheet.

13. Reform a dough ball from the scrap material with all and care and delicacy as if you were bathing an infant. Re-smoosh and cut rounds out of the remaining dough. You’ll still have a few stray scraps; you can give at least one to Kitchen Bitch if you like. More would probably have unfortunate digestive consequences. As a side note, if you’re using our cutter, this recipe makes a baker’s dozen of biscuits rather than a dozen.

14. Wash your hands and dump your baking stuff into the sink. Wash the measuring cup and get down a saucepot for the grits. Dispense the water and start that boiling. Dry off the measuring cup and fill with a cup of grits. Get the pepper-and-salt mix out. Finally, stick the biscuits into the oven and set the timer.

Bring water to a boil. Add salt and pepper. Add grits and cook until water is absorbed, about 20 to 25 minutes.

15. Once the water is boiling, throw in three generous pinches of salt mix, then add the grits. Back the heat down from high to somewhere between medium-high and medium after the grits attempt to climb right back out of the pot.

16. We’ve only got the one kitchen timer and you have no idea if the grits are going to attempt another escape, so… it’s time to stand around aimlessly for awhile. Stir the grits every once in awhile and wonder what, exactly, constitutes “done” with grits, since you’ve been served them at almost every consistency from “nearly liquid” to “wallpaper paste” in the past. Optional: do as the radio suggests and “jump, jump, jump to tha rhythm”.

17. Extract the biscuits once twenty minutes have passed and tack another five minutes onto the timer. Occupy yourself for the next five doing dances around your spouse and handing him things as you both attempt to work at the same time. Decide the grits have achieved a sufficient unitary quality after the five minutes and stir in the butter and salt, being sure that all the butter melts. Bugger off for a few minutes so Spouse can finish up with the shrimp and bacon. Let him serve, why not. Add a biscuit to the side of your plate. Nom.

The grits turned out very tasty indeed, and made a rapid convert out of Stingray, though he opined that crab might actually have been a better accompaniment than shrimp. The biscuits mostly turned out curiously flat, and to my puzzlement, the ones from the second pass rose much more than the first row and were lighter. Then it occurred to me as I was sitting down to write this that I’d never given it the initial “5-6 folds” mandated in the recipe; I’d gotten distracted by the dough sticking to my hand and skipped a step unconsciously. The thing about biscuits is that working the dough at all forms gluten; in order to get the big, light, fluffy biscuits that are the best kind, you have to get enough gluten that the dough has some strength and can rise, but not so much that it becomes too dense to rise much, let alone give to tooth. My biscuits were certainly not dense, but they hadn’t been worked enough to be of proper dimension. This is easy to fix next time, fortunately.

*Yes**.
**Yes, TD, my footnotes are still not hyperlinked. I’ll figure it out later. Or NEVER. Muahahahaa so there.

Posted Cooking Noob, Food |