Cooking For Engineers

[Guest]

[Guest]

From county to county, town to town; family to family, kitchen to kitchen - for centuries ALL recipes were different as they were handed down from mother to daughter and each adapted it. E.g. my grandmother who taught me to bake sodabread used only flour, baking soda and buttermilk (with a pinch of salt & sugar) her daughter (my aunt, obviously) used butter, a lot more sugar and eggs in her recipe - as she kept more hens and had spare eggs! It is only with the advent of cookery books and esp the Internet that recipes have become standardised. Here in Ireland, sodabreads, soda farls, scones etc are all derived from the same idea. Some sweet, some savoury; some incorporating fats, some not. So bread, scone or biscuit, it is quite obvious that with the invention of baking soda the handiness of using it instead of yeast was such a blessing to the harried housewife that it travelled the world and the recipes evolved. As have we all!

[Biscuits]

The variation that I use when substituting buttermilk (or sour milk or diluted yogurt) for sweet milk is to use 2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp soda. Then I work in the liquid very carefully, and add only enough until the dough clings together. You want to handle the dough as little as possible; over-handling makes it tough. My son loves these, and begs for them frequently. It's also a good way to use up milk that's gone sour.

[scichinin]

On my home planet biscuits are called cvziti and scones are ziticvz. The people in South only make and eat cvziti! Very common there, they even feed to grondala. But in main island exists inland gravy sea! In north we have to use melted forlaag, but there are many islindl, so that is easy. No fruit, not even marmalade (same word!) trees. Thanks for recipe. Your planet has many pretty women and csindij!
scichinin

[Guest]

So yeah...these biscuits are crap. Pretty much all the milk turned the dough into a big wet sticky lump that was impossible to form into anything resembling a ball. Thanks for wasting my time and ingredients.

[IronRinger]

[Jacks]

Nice biscuit recipe! Talking biscuits, browsing in an old magazine from the 1800s, I found recently an old coffee biscuit recipe that I posted on my site -- the coffee biscuits, like "coffee cakes" today, were just biscuits or wafers, to eat together with coffee.

[Robert]

I recently learned that in the southern US flour is made with Soft Wheat. This has less gluten than Hard Wheat and makes much better, softer, biscuits. I am going to try mixing our regular, Hard Wheat, flour with first 25% Rice flour to reduce the gluten content. If that is not enough I will try 50%. [I used to be an engineer. Left it about 25 years ago.]

[Dilbert]

I use All Purpose flour for biscuits - it that available in your area?