Baking Biscuits While the World Burns

Yesterday I made this Facebook post:  "So, the world is breaking into bits, but I feel compelled to note that I have made the best batch of biscuits ever, and I've been baking biscuits since I was 9 years old. Usually my biscuits are closer to hockey pucks, but not this time. I achieved both height and flakiness. Was it the extra tablespoons of butter in the recipe? It's easily double the amount of butter I usually use. Was it the use of the pastry cutter and not the food processor? The fact that the recipe uses both baking soda and baking powder? Can I replicate this experience again? Stay tuned! In the meantime, here's a link to the recipe, in case you want to run your own experiment (the pictures are from the website--we ate all the biscuits I made before I thought to take a picture)."

Part of me wonders why I'm writing about biscuits instead of the Israel/Gaza situation.  But I started baking biscuits shortly after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, which some commentators say was the last time Israel had such a disastrous failure of intelligence and security.  Through all sorts of crises, I've turned to baking, sometimes biscuits, sometimes homemade bread, often cakes and cookies.

Of course, I would likely have been doing that baking had there been no geopolitical crisis.  I don't have much to say in terms of writing further about the situation in Israel, not much more than I said in last week's blog post.  So, yes, let me write about biscuits.

I first started making biscuits in childhood, but I can't remember exactly why.  Because of my voracious reading, I was interested in making the foods I read about, so that's probably what led me to biscuits.  My mom found a recipe in Helen Corbitt Cooks for Company, one of her favorite cookbooks, and I was off.

That cookbook is long gone, so I can't compare that recipe to the one I used on Sunday.  I know that through the years, as I've been worried about my weight and our intake of saturated fat, I've tried to make cookies with reduced amounts of butter.  On Sunday, I followed the recipe on the Smitten Kitchen site without making any changes, so I used nine tablespoons of butter.

When I first started making biscuits long ago, I used two knives to cut in the butter, a laborious chore.  I was thrilled to discover the food processor made short work of the job, although I didn't really use one until the 1980's.  But after Sunday's experience, I wonder if the food processor made the butter too fine.

On Sunday, I used a pastry cutter.  I've always wanted one, and in September, a dear friend gave me I a gift basket with one.  I decided to give it a try on Sunday, and it did the perfect job of mixing the butter chunks with the flour.  I'll be using it again, for biscuits and pie crust.

I had stopped making both biscuits and pie crust because my efforts came out too tough.  For pie crust, I thought that the ready-made, roll into your pan crusts worked fine, and certainly better than my own efforts.  For biscuits, I haven't used any of the ready to bake offerings--they all taste of chemicals to me.

Maybe I'll return to pie crusts.  I have a lot of apples.  I see an apple pie in our near future.