The Greasy Pimp in my Kitchen

Yes, that greasy gangsta in my kitchen that goes by two names: "Crisco" and "Shortnin' " and sometimes, for the crass among us, just plain old "Grease"; I just can't get rid of him. Everytime I think I can stop using that hydrogenated blob of fat, he just looks at me and says "You OWE me! I been sittin up in here, ALL this time! Just waiting to get my greasy self in your biscuits!" To which I respond, "Go into my damn biscuit recipe and make it tender. You happy now?"

You may be asking yourself, "Michelle, girlfriend, where is all this grease hate coming from? And why are you talking to your Crisco?"
I'll answer the second question first. I have to entertain you somehow, so why not give personalities and voices to my pantry ingredients? To the first question, the grease hate stems from my desire to be a goddess of health and wellness. I want my veins to not be clogged. I want to live past 55.  I know, real smart to be all dietary n' crap while learning how to cook like the owner of a diner. Seriously though, shortening falls into the CONSUME-IF-YOU-WANT-A-HUGE-ASS category. Since I tend to care more about my heart and veins than my ass, I decided to make biscuits with the all-natural goodness of pure butter. Butter does not have trans fats (which clog your arteries much more quickly) and is more easily digested. Yes, butter isn't great great, but if you have to bake with fat, it is a more natural option than shortening.

But let's face it, is white flour combined with butter really any good at all? I know that as a future chef, I will need to know how to make a good biscuit. And since I love baking, and I'm still waiting on my damn book, what the hell, let's make it biscuit time.

Not only is it an ass contributor, a biscuit, in either brick or pillow texture, is so loaded with carbs, that it sends me straight into a carb coma on the couch. It's as if the adulterated white flour gets just totally dumped on my pancreas, and my pancreas just stops, looks at me and says "What in the lickin liver is this? WHAT am I supposed to do with all this carb? You just need to lay down while I process this. Seriously, you're killing me." 

But who cares about all that...

As you've probably gathered by now, the buttery biscuits I made this morning didn't come out so buttery great. I mean, they weren't totally terrible. I was able to use the rock hard, slightly tender on the inside biscuits as a vehicle to sample the cloudberry and gooseberry jams that I purchased from IKEA last week. But still, they were not the fluffy, light, tender experience I was dreaming of. Okay, nothing like a KFC biscuit dipped in coleslaw juice (am I the only one that does that?).

Nothing new is easy though, and no matter what we work on, it will take practice. This is why people go to Denny's and KFC when they're hungry rather than spending hours in a frustrating experimental kitchen disaster. I'm hoping to offer at least my mistakes so others don't waste their time using just butter, overworking the dough, or incorporating too much all-purpose flour from the counter. I also should not have brought the butter to room temperature. I was trying to get a shortening-like consistency but I learned that warm butter is bad because of some sort of CO2 thing going on in the oven. Here is the article that explains it: http://busycooks.about.com/od/quicktips/qt/makebiscuits.htm

And by the way, after studying Julia's recipe, I realized I read it wrong. Her trick is to use some cake flour, yes, but she does NOT omit the shortening. How did I think she used only butter? Did someone slip some pot in my Starbucks? I don't know, maybe I was hyper excited about learning the cake flour trick and magical things started happening in my mind, like KFC biscuits made with pure ingredients. In all of my cookbooks, biscuit recipes use shortening to gain the tenderness. In my opinion, they are all loose hookers selling out to the greasy pimp that is not even found in nature. Some slightly more respectable recipes involve cream and no butter or shortening but I tried a cream biscuit recipe once, but it had the dry taste and texture of a hymnal book dug up from the basement of an old church. Maybe it was user error, I don't know, I will try again it sometime.

For now though, I will focus on the baking powder biscuits because I never met a good one that I didn't want to marry. So, off to the grocery store I shall go for more butter and fresh baking powder because another screw up thing to do is use baking powder that is more than six months old. As for that Greasy Pimp in my Damn Kitchen, I may sell out and let him work his way into my business.