Buttermilk Biscuits

This is my first time making biscuits from scratch. Partly because they always intimidated me for some reason. Turns out they're pretty easy.



One trick is the butter. I suppose I could use margarine, but most of those are worse for you than butter. Back when I had my heart attack, I became obsessed with, among other things, trans-fat. At the time, when I tried to tell someone their 'reduced fat' whatever was worse than if it was shortened with lard, only my cardiologist failed to scoff. He knew, of course, but try telling someone in 2002 that a Boca Burger has some serious artery clogging shit in it.



Smart Balance is pretty good stuff, but I was wary that it might not perform as well as butter. You want the butter cold so it'll be hard, and I wasn't sure Smart Balance got hard enough. So I bought some unsalted butter. I go through a pound a year of the stuff, give or take a stick, so I'm probably okay — I hope.



Anyway, I whisked together:

2 cups flour
1 tblsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda

Then cut it with my pastry knife with a cold stick of butter until the butter was like little white BBs.



Then I added a cup of buttermilk (what else?) and stirred until it was stiff.

I kneaded it by folding it on a floured countertop, maybe twenty times. Mash it out, fold it in half, mash it out again, fold it in half.



I rolled out the dough and used my martini shaker to cut the biscuits (it was the largest diameter thing in the glasses cupboard that had enough edge to do the job). Baked them for ten minutes at 425ºF.



Em had wanted Spam for breakfast, so I had that going, and I made a Spam red-eye gravy she refused to try with the drippings of the Spam and a dollop of pork stock.