Looking for a really good White Lily flour biscuit recipe

[Blue_playwright]

Old fashioned and fluffy and tender. My 88-year-old dad keeps talking about the biscuits my grandma used to make and I am just not happy wasting $1 million dollar bags of flours in a crapshoot online. Lol

Anyone have a favorite family recipe?

[Saviolo]

1. Here's hubby's recipe.

He grew up in Houston, and these are the ones he makes. They typically come out lovely and fluffy, and you can add a bit of cheese to the dough as well, if you like.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. From The White Lily package

2 c. White Lily Enriched Bleached Self-Rising Flour
1/4 c. Crisco All-Vegetable Shortening
3/4 c. buttermilk or 2/3 c. milk
3 TBS butter, melted (optional)

Heat oven to 475 degrees.

Place flour in large bowl. Cut in shortening with pastry blender or two knives until crumbs are the size of peas. Add buttermilk, stirring with fork just until flour is moistened.

Turn dough onto lightly floured surface. Knead gently 5 to 6 times, just until smooth. Roll dough into 7-inch circle that is 3/4 inch to 1 inch thick. Cut out 7 to 8 biscuits using a floured 2-inch biscuit cutter. Place on baking sheet, about 1 inch apart. (For softer biscuits, arrange so that edges almost touch.) Shape dough scraps into a ball. Pat out until 3/4-inch thick. Cut out additional biscuits.

Bake 6 to 10 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from oven. Brush with butter, if desired.

Makes one dozen.

[hlthe2b]

2. Southern Living's classic biscuit recipe (obviously uses White Lily Flour)

even though it doesn't specify:
https://www.southernliving.com/recipes/buttermilk-biscuits


I know this because they reviewed JoAnna Gaine's recipe (aka of HGTV fame) and made mention of it. Her recipe might be worth trying as well, though it includes eggs. A link is included in this article:

https://www.southernliving.com/bread/biscuits/joanna-gaines-biscuit-recipe-test

[Kali]

7. eggs in biscuits?

just NO

[hlthe2b]

8. Yeah.. You can tell the Southern Living editor was trying to be diplomatic, but...

[Major Nikon]

4. I think your best place to start is on the White Lily website

This recipe is pretty close to mine although I have my own way of doing it that doesn't use WL.
https://www.whitelily.com/recipes/brian-hoffman%27s-buttermilk-biscuits-99012

Here's my tips:
WL A/P flour comes in regular and self rising. You want to match the recipe to the one you have.

Use a pastry blender to incorporate the fat with the flour. There are other ways to do it and I've tried them all. A pastry blender works the best.

The idea is you want to keep the butter(and/or lard/shortening) as cold as possible and you want to incorporate it as quickly as possible before it starts to melt. You also don't want the chunks of butter to be too small or too large. You might be tempted to use a food processor, but don't. What I do is I cut the fat into a small dice, put it on a piece of wax paper and back into the fridge it goes for about 30 minutes.

Measure your flour by weight if possible. Works much better than trying to do it by volume. After you measure your flour, chill it in the fridge along with the butter you cut up.

Whatever liquids you use, make sure they are as cold as possible prior to mixing.

Try to work the dough as little as possible. The more you work it, the more gluten you will develop and you want as little as possible.

As everything warms in the oven the fat melts and the liquids in it create steam. That steam works in conjunction with the CO2 produced by the acid/base reaction to leaven your biscuits. If you do everything right, the biscuits will be light and fluffy. Do it wrong and you get little round meteors.

If you bake with the sides touching, they will rise more. I usually bake in a heated cast iron skillet.

Make sure your baking powder and/or baking soda is fresh. Baking powder only has a shelf life of about a year. If your baking powder is getting close to that, use a bit more than the recipe calls for.

All baking powders are not equal. Below is an excellent review of several. The short version is buy Argo if you can.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/12997/baking-powder

[Kali]

9. you strike me as someone who may have tried both kinds of pastry cutters

the "knife" type like at your link and the old round wire type. if you have, did you notice a difference in the final product? I have a couple of old wire ones and have been curious about the knife ones for a while but I am too cheap to buy one just to do that experiment.

[Major Nikon]

10. I have, but not recently

There's three different types that I know of, and probably a few that I don't. There's the handle with 4-5 curved blades, there's basically the same thing except for wires, and then there's a 3rd type which has a handle and a series of flat wires which is something like a potato masher, but isn't.

Of the three I've used the first two as growing up we had the type with the curved wires. It's been decades since I've used one, but I can't remember it working any better or worse than the blade type I own now, which is the same type my grandmother used when she taught me to make biscuits as a kid.

If I were you I certainly wouldn't buy something different. All of the types mentioned do pretty much the same thing, which is to cut the butter into smaller chunks reasonably quickly.

[Blue_playwright]

12. Wow! Thank you for all these tips!

I’m a good cook but Baking has never been my thing aside from cookies!

[Lars39]

5. Take a big bowl of flour and make a well....

bacon drippings and buttermilk are involved.

[pansypoo53219]

6. i tried buttermilk i had + ruined my normally good biscuits. i use extra aged baking powder.

i use lard + the settlement cookbooks recipe. been baking in cast iron.

[Major Nikon]

11. I like to use half lard, half butter

That is to say when I have lard on hand, which isn't all that often.

[Blue_playwright]

13. I have both! I'll try that, I like the flavor of both.

Nt

[Major Nikon]

14. Here's why I use both when I can

The butter I keep on hand is an Irish butter which is very different than most butter you'll find in the US. It has a much more intense flavor and as such when you use it exclusively to make biscuits they wind up with a bit too strong of a butter taste. So by using half lard the butter taste doesn't overwhelm the biscuits.

Another reason is I think lard does a better job of leavening than butter and the texture of the biscuits wind up better.

Lard and butter also have different melting temperatures, so by using both you get a bit of a double action out of them.

So you very well could use all lard, shortening, or butter and all will do the job for you. I just think using half lard and half butter does the job best at least in my recipe which uses whole wheat pastry flour instead of white a/p.

[dem in texas]

15. Mother in Law's Biscuit Recipe

Here is a recipe for light, fluffy biscuits as made by my late mother-in-law. She instructed me until I was finally able to duplicate her wonderful biscuits. She used lard in her dough and I have changed the recipe to call for vegetable shortening. She also used self-rising flour and it works very well. If you use self-rising flour, omit the baking powder and salt.

Preheat oven to 450˚

2 cups flour 1/3 cup shortening, at room temperature so it is a little soft
4 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together and place in mixing bowl. With your spoon, make a “hole” in the center of the flour mixture. Put the shortening and milk in the hole and using a large spoon start gradually working the milk and shortening into the flour. Continue until the milk and shortening are completely mixed with the flour. You should have soft sticky dough.

Turn the dough out on a heavily floured breadboard or waxed paper and knead lightly a minute or so, working in a little flour. Sprinkle flour over the dough and gently roll out with a rolling pen to about 1/2" thick. Cut into rounds using a biscuit cutter. Place the rounds on a greased baking sheet. For softer, higher biscuits, place rounds so they touch closely. For crisper biscuits, place them further apart.

Bake in a hot oven (450°) for 12 to 15 minutes until browned on top. Serve with butter, jam and honey.

As far as the brand of flour, I always buy the cheapest brand of all purpose flour, I get the same results each time.

[Blue_playwright]

16. Well, I made them.

Used the WL recipe with the tricks and tips from you guys.

They turned out perfectly.

But after saying they were “good” my dad went on a 20 minute rant about me cooking to much here (we’re at our family cabin) and my late mother didn’t try to cook so much and make so many dishes and such a mess (um, kneading dough here) and she knew just how to cook at the cabin and do it right. It’s a cabin not your home after all.

🤷🏻‍♀️ Not sure why I expected anything different. I made from-scratch egg noodles for chicken and noodles and got more of a lecture about how I don’t live up to my mom instead of compliments or thanks.

That was in addition to my apparent lack of cleaning skills because “ she could just keep things clean. That’s just how she was. You do things different. “ 🙄

If I had a therapist they would need therapy.

But thank you. It was easy and I’ll definitely try them again!