sour cream and scallion biscuits
(vegetarian)

recipe by m-c

just the recipe

what I was looking for

Pure indulgence.

what I made

People say you can't change baking recipes, but of course you can, else where would new baking recipes come from. Having worked on Alice Waters's cream biscuits for a whole week with my friend Tess -- they come from page 275 of The Art of Simple Food -- I felt confident that I could work some changes on the recipe without peril. As Tess and I had found, high biscuits instead of flat ones are delectable. Many biscuit recipes call for buttermilk; I decided to test out whether sour cream would make a good change. And since I'm embarking on a Chinese adventure, I put scallions in the dough. As far as I know, Chinese people don't eat sour cream scallion biscuits ... yet.

chit-chat

I haven't tried this recipe with anything but plain sour cream, and I think you shouldn't either. When I say "plain sour cream," I mean sour cream whose label says, "Ingredients: Grade A Cultured Cream," the end. Here in Seattle, Daisy brand is what I use. Nothing against corn starch, gelatin, carrageenan, vegetable rennet, and guar gum, but I'm not sure how they'll behave in baking.

grades for my version

healthy	D	A rare treat.
fast	C	Margaret could probably put these together in two shakes, but for me they take longer.
easy	D	The very soft dough is hard to work with.
cheap	B	Good butter, good sour cream.
delicious	A	Pretty durned good.

yield

8 biscuits

equipment

    a mixing bowl
    a mixing spoon
    measuring cups
    measuring spoons
    a small sieve (a.k.a. a tea sieve),
             if needed
    a pastry blender
    a sharp knife
    a fork
    a rubber scraper
    a dishtowel
    a rolling pin
    biscuit cutters
    a cookie sheet

the dry stuff

ingredients	Alice	m-c	why?
all-purpose flour	1 ½ cups	1 ½ cups	no change
salt	¼ teaspoon	to taste	no change
sugar	4 teaspoons	1 teaspoon	tastier [1]
baking powder	2 teaspoons	2 teaspoons	no change
addition	---	6 scallions, chopped fine	an experiment
Notes
[1]	Tastier in the revised recipe -- 4 teaspoons is just right in the original recipe.

                    Mix the dry ingredients together. (Old-fashioned recipes will tell you to sift them together, which serves the double purpose of combining the ingredients and breaking up clumps, which tend to form especially in baking powder. If you see clumps, put the baking powder through a little sieve.)

the butter

ingredients	Alice	m-c	why?
butter	6 Tablespoons	6 Tablespoons	no change

        Cut the butter into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender and a knife. If you're not familiar with this technique, here's an appendix about it.

If you prefer, you can cut the butter into the flour in your food processor. But you won't be able to mix the liquid into the dough in the processor -- the dough is far too fragile once you start adding the sour cream, and must be worked by hand.

the sour cream

ingredients	Alice	m-c	why?
creamy ingredient	¾ cup heavy cream	1 cup sour cream plus extra as needed	an experiment

Dump in around half of the cup of the sour cream (no need to measure exactly). This is where the recipe gets hard. The sour cream isn't as liquid as heavy cream, and you want it to take up all the dry stuff without hard mixing.

        I found a combination of a fork and a rubber scraper seemed to give me the best results, and I kept on adding sour cream, adding sour cream, till all the dry stuff was taken up. Then I gave the mixture one quick final stir and didn't work it any more.

    Put a damp towel over the top of the bowl (not touching the dough) and put the bowl into the refrigerator for at least half an hour -- more is fine.

rolling the dough out

Preheat your oven to 400°.

    Rolling out dough this fragile is difficult. Flour your rolling surface to the max. You want to be rolling in flour. ("Rolling in flour," heh, heh.) Turn the dough out and flour the top. (Don't scrape down any bits that are left in the bowl -- abandon them.) Now gently, gently roll the dough to a thickness of about 3". That's not a typo, you're making really thick biscuits here.

    Cut out the biscuits and lay them on a heavily greased (or nonstick) cookie sheet. I've started using Silpats a lot, but there are a number of other options I want to try before I settle on one.

Bake the biscuits for 12 minutes. Now start to check them every minute. You want them glamorously browned, nothing more than that, and you want them to feel ever so slightly springy, not hard. Mine took exactly 16 minutes, yours may take more, or they may take less.

Biscuits are best fresh out of the oven.

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