It makes roughly 15-20 biscuits.Ģ sticks butter, grated and frozen for at least 1 hour This recipe is adapted slightly from the Rise and Shine Biscuits in the Red Truck Bakery Cookbook by Brian Noyes. Bake at 450 for 12 minutes, turning once. Cut in the butter, then add the buttermilk and gently stir until the dough just comes together. For the flour, she uses a locally grown soft wheat pastry flour from Ground Up Grain in western Massachusetts. The original called for milk and Crisco, but Lesley has swapped these out for buttermilk and butter. They're her first choice for an easy biscuit, and for strawberry shortcake. These are adapted from a recipe Lesley has been cooking since she was a kid. Lesley Marchessault's Go-To Drop Biscuit's But she’s still constantly trying new flours or cornmeal or different butters - because it turns out the real fun is the experimenting and of course the tasting. She has a favorite drop biscuit recipe and a favorite folded biscuit recipe which we share below. Lesley says in her quest to find the ultimate biscuit, she’s realized she likes variety. We taste all three and they’re each delicious in their own way. There's a delightful sound of laminated biscuits coming out of the oven in a hot sizzling pool of butter. She counts, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Can I have one!" My daughter has come along on this interview, and tries to wait patiently for all three batches of biscuits to come out of the oven. The drop biscuits are much easier - Lesley simply mixes together the ingredients in a bowl and plops piles of dough about the size of a tomato onto a baking sheet - this time, with plenty of space between them. "And then we’re going to add butter and buttermilk instead of Crisco and milk and see what kind of difference it makes." Pastry flour has less protein than regular flour which makes it lighter and the one Lesley’s using in this new jazzed-up recipe comes from a local mill in Western Massachussetts. "The new jazzed-up one has that fancy pastry flour," she says. The regular one just has all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, and also Crisco and regular milk. "I decided we could do a little Pepsi challenge and have the recipe as it you know exists from my childhood, just normal with Crisco and milk and then also one that’s a little jazzed up." But Lesley also loves drop biscuits - and she’s been playing around with the basic outline of her beloved childhood recipe. These are her major tips for rolled biscuits. And though Lesley really likes the look of round biscuits, she says square ones are much more practical, because you don’t want to keep reshaping scraps - it makes the biscuits dense instead of tender. Lesley says it's best to cook these biscuits almost touching to make them rise extra high, and the recipe she likes best recommends doing this in a cast iron skillet. Lesley Marchessault in the kitchen preparing biscuits. "And then when you put it on your tongue it’s just this little piece of buttery air, buttery heaven really." "And then when you cut it and you bake it you’ll have kind of have those, like the Pillsbury you know where you peel off one layer after another that I think a lot of people are really trying to go for," she says. The dough is incredibly wet - Lesley has to dip her bench scraper in flour between each use - but she manages to fold it into thirds twice. "So now I’m going to take this bench scraper and just kind of go underneath the dough and what we want to do is just fold it in thirds." Finally, she turns the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and pats it gently into a rectangle. Then she tosses it with the dry ingredients and very gently mixes in buttermilk and heavy cream. First of all, she’s already grated her butter and then frozen it, so that it melts as little as possible while she mixes. And there are some other secrets as Lesley shows me. And a good way of making your biscuits have those layers is by doing just a couple of folds," Lesley says.īasically instead of doing lots and lots of folds, for biscuits you just do a few so that the butter is still visible. But with the biscuit technique, you want the flour and the butter to not really marry. That’s how you achieve those layers in croissants. "It's what happens when you make a croissant. These rolled biscuits rely on a technique called lamination. The other world Lesley’s talking about is rolled biscuits - the kind that are cut into circles or squares and often served as part of a breakfast sandwich. "I had no idea what this other world was really in biscuit making," she said. She decided to try a variety of recipes because as a kid, she only knew about drop biscuits. Lesley Marchessault of Provincetown has gotten serious about her biscuit recipes.
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