I have a confession to make: I hate using canned biscuits.
It’s not that I don’t like how they taste. It’s not that I have some sort of environmental or moral reason I don’t like them.
Plain and simple, I hate using canned biscuits, because every time I have to open a can, it scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter how ready I am for the “pop” of the container opening, it still seems to give me heart palpitations.
The problem is that I absolutely love biscuits. Joey and I regularly enjoy having breakfast for dinner with a nice big plate of biscuits and sausage gravy, so I’ve always just put up with the terror (OK, maybe that’s a bit overdramatic) of opening canned biscuits.
It’s always been a necessity, because, unfortunately, despite my love of biscuits, my attempts at making them have always fallen flat (literally. Flat and a little tough.), so recently when I found myself without a tube of biscuits in the fridge and a craving for some breakfast for dinner, I was hesitant to try to go homemade, but the craving won out, and I went searching for a new biscuit recipe to try.
Lucky for my stomach, this time I was successful in my biscuit-making attempts, and Joey has officially banned the making of canned biscuits from here on out (which is perfectly fine with me).
The recipe I tried this time is supposedly one that a woman named Ruth used to make for the Texas State Fair every year, so I figured the whole state couldn’t be wrong. You can find the original recipe at http://www.bubblews.com/news/958224-cousin-ruthhomemade-biscuits-recipe, but I’ll warn you that whoever posted the recipe forgot to mention the baking powder, so make sure you add that in if you go to the Internet to make these.
Cousin Ruth’s Homemade Biscuits
Ingredients
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cups milk
- 1/4 cup shortening
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
- Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Cut in the shortening until it’s well combined (the texture will become a bit mealy).
- Add milk and stir. Turn the dough out onto a well-floured board and knead until all of the ingredients are well-combined and the dough is soft and easy to roll. If it’s too sticky, add a bit more flour. If it’s tough and hard to work with, add a little more milk.
- After the dough is kneaded into a soft ball, roll it out to about half an inch thickness.
- Use a biscuit cutter or a drinking glass to cut out biscuits. Continue to roll out dough and cut it into biscuits until all the dough is used (if you have a weird little bit left over, go ahead and bake it. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll still be tasty. That’s your “taste tester” piece!).
- Place the biscuits on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until the biscuits are golden brown.
My biscuits puffed up beautifully, and they were delicious both on their own and smothered in gravy. We did discover that they weren’t quite as good as leftovers a couple days later, though, so you may have to suffer through finishing off the batch the same day you make them. (Oh, what horrible suffering, huh?)
If you’re like me and have had bad luck with biscuits, I hope these turn out as well for you as they did for me. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy they were to make, too. To be honest, it probably only added about 10 to 15 minutes to my overall routine over using the canned biscuits, and I didn’t once have to worry about scaring myself to death with the effort, and that, combined with how good these were, was well worth it.
This piece first appeared in print on Sept. 5, 2013.
Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.
