The Quest For Biscuits

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house where home cooking and baking was the norm. The house was often filled with the warm aromas of fresh baked bread, sweet cinnamon rolls, oozing mountains of pasta and cheeses, and myriads of vegetable dishes. Though raised vegetarian, there seemed to never be a lack of tasty dishes.

My mother, and subsequently my three sisters, were all the down home country cook types. Being surrounded by such kitchen expertise, I came to love all things food from an early age. I often helped my mother bake breads, cookies, mini cakes and the like, and by the age of probably 8 or so had already had some successful forays in and about the kitchen.

In addition to baking, we always had a large garden from which we filled wheelbarrows and baskets full of squash, peppers, green beans, tomatoes and all sorts of other homegrown goodness. So much so that my parents often were carting large amounts of produce to give away at church or to perhaps half the people in our neighborhood. My mother, being a school bus driver and having summers off, spent much of the summer canning tomatoes, making tomato juice, freezing vegetables, or canning peaches, pears, plums, and making homemade applesauce from the fruit we picked at a local "pick-your-own" farm market. Our dungeon-like basement (or so it seemed to me as a child with its crumbly walls and dingy light bulbs) was filled with shelves upon shelves of these home canned goods that would take us through the winter until the growing season returned once again.

With such a background, you would think I would have taken all of this with me into adulthood, and become some reknowned chef, or at the very least have a spot on a Food Network competition. But alas, with busy schedules and good old fashioned American laziness, I delved into the realms of fast food, box pasta mixes and frozen vegetables, feeling quite proud of myself when I spruced up a dish with a sprig of parsley or a few dashes of pepper.

It wasn't until after my divorce at age 30 that I began to rediscover the joys and satisfaction of cooking from scratch. No longer a vegetarian, I also began to try all sorts of new dishes, from baked salmon with lemon to trying my hand at steaks on the grill. Spurred on by some early successes such as the Spinach Swiss Wreath (my take on a Pampered Chef Recipe) and a homemade Focaccia/Sauceless Pizza that went over well with the fellas for Sunday night football games, I continued on with my kitchen endeavors.

However, with the exception of the Focaccia bread that I made, I had not truly returned to my baking roots. On a recent Sunday morning, my girlfriend and I decided that biscuits and gravy would be a great way to start a cold February weekend morning. In recent years, this meant I would simply throw some Pillsbury biscuits in the oven and whip a packet of gravy, but being without the complete store bought premade rolls, I thought I would attempt a semi-scratch version. "I've been baking since the age of 8!" I thought to myself, "Biscuits will be easy!".

Now as I said, this was a semi-scratch version, as I did not have enough flour or yeast to go full on biscuit mode. However, I had milk, some Bisquick and a good supply of tap water, so I started mixing and following the directions on the box of Bisquick. The dough came out looking as it should, and I was quite proud of myself by this point. These biscuits were going to rule! But once I rolled the dough out, it seemed to be a little thin for a flaky multi-layered stick to your ribs type biscuit. I used a regular drinking glass to cut out perfect rounds and then put them on the already greased baking pan. They seem to be staring forlornly back at me. Deciding that this was not going to work, I took the remaing dough, formed it back into a ball and rolled it again and cut out another set of rounds, placing these atop the ones on the baking sheet. I repeated this a third time, now positive that I would have a nice tri-layered set of biscuits once they rose to their full height of greatness in the oven.

Putting the sheet in the oven, my girlfriend and I waited eagerly for them to finish baking, while I whipped up a package of powdered sausage gravy....ok it wasn't all from scratch, but it was baby steps here.

Finally the timer went off and I opened the oven and was greeted with the wonderful aroma of freshly made biscuits. The aroma was about as far as the "wonderfulness" went however. Looking in, I saw some sad and very dilapidated and flattened mounds that very much wanted to be biscuits. Upon taking them out and adding them to the plates, we found they were better off as very crunchy crackers then biscuits. But being the optimists that we are, we added the gravy and crunched through our breakfast, being careful not to chip a tooth in our efforts.

So now I am on a quest to make great biscuits from scratch. In the meantime, I thought it may be helpful to share my experiences, recipes I try, and mistakes to not only show that anyone can have success in the kitchen, but also that not every dish is going to come out as planned. I continue to try many new dishes, some excellent, others to be left to someone with better kitchen skills then I. For as with any quest, many other lessons are learned and friends made along the way. The quest for biscuits will be a journey of epic proportions.