It's been a while since I blogged.
I apologize; my schedule at work is undergoing a sea change as the final crews are shaking out and everyone is being reassigned, so things are...
...Interesting.
The bureaucracy at work describes it as "organized chaos."
I think that's fairly accurate. Emphasis on the chaos.
But that just means you need good food before you go to work!
So, first we get to talk about fat.
Why? Because you can't make good biscuits - or pancakes, waffles, cookies, pie crust, or anything fried, without it.
The big push for years has been to cook with vegetable oils, "because they're healthy."
This is your reality check.
Saturated fats - and hydrogenated or the really villainous "partially" hydrogenated fats - are now universally recognized to be the bad guys. So which food products have more of them?
Butter? Don't make me laugh; 72 grams of butter - 6 tablespoons, enough for a small biscuit recipe - contains 37.11 grams of saturated fats.
Lard contains 28.09 grams of saturated fats per 6 tablespoons.
Vegetable oils and shortening contain far less of the saturated fats, but their ingredients are a roll call of health villains: partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oils (Country Crock,) partially- and fully- hydrogenated cottonseed oils and partially-hydrogenated soybean oil (Crisco.)
Good luck with that.
Lard has nearly 20% less saturated fat than butter, and better than twice the level of the healthy monounsaturated fat that butter does. (Also, a hell of a lot more of it than margarine; 9 grams of monounsaturated fat in 6 tablespoons of Country Crock versus nearly 40 grams in lard.)
As an animal product, lard is something your body is designed to digest, and it metabolizes fully, something NONE of the vegetable products can factually claim, sorry vegans.
So: you can buy lard in most groceries, still, although unless you hit a Hispanic store, it may tend to be in small, small portions - typically a 1-pound tub.
Or you can hit up a local farmer, and make your own, because the storebought stuff is often partially hydrogenated as well - check the label.
I'll tell you how, and then tell you how to make proper Southern-style buttermilk biscuits, and two kinds of gravy to go with 'em.
First, get with a farmer, and try to come up with several pounds of pork back fat. This is NOT bacon fat, but the fat that runs along the pig's spine; it forms in pads up to several inches thick, and is the least marbled fat on the animal.
Either cut the fat into small chunks, or run it through a meat grinder.
Melt it, very slowly, in an open pan, or an untopped crock-pot. It will bubble even with the heat fairly low, like the crock-pot; when this becomes sluggish, filter the fat through a cheesecloth.
The chunks of now-deep-fried pork remaining in the cheesecloth are "cracklin's," and they can be used for a variety of things, all of which are yummy.
The fat itself is... liquid lard. Refrigerate it to get it solid, or (better,) use it in its liquid form.
Right.
To understand the wonderfulnessness that lard brings to baking is impossible, really, to describe to people who grew up on canola oil.
One of the Slate food writers described it as "the most elegant fat I've ever met."
Yeah, that.
Perfect pie crusts, beautiful pancakes, amazing biscuits...
...Hey, I was gonna tell you about biscuits, right?
You will need:
2 cups of unbleached white flour - if you can find White Lily flour, that's the good stuff - it's made from wheat harvested at a different time than most brands, and it cooks better.
1 tablespoon of baking powder
1/3 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
1/2 cup of lard (you can substitute unsalted butter here if you MUST but blech, and you're missing the point.)
3/4 cup plus two tablespoons of buttermilk.
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.
Begin by sifting the dry ingredients together until they are well-mixed.
Use either a food processor, or mad talent with a pastry blender, to cut in the lard until you have a coarse meal-like dough.
Add the buttermilk, and blend quickly, until all the dough is moist. It WILL be sticky.
Turn the dough out onto a floured board, flour your hands, and knead the dough 3 or 4 times. Try not to overhandle it.
Roll or pat - I prefer pat - the dough out to about a 3/4 inch thickness, and then cut with a biscuit cutter.
Place your biscuits on a lightly greased baking sheet. The placement matters; biscuits placed close together will have soft sides, and rise higher, while biscuits set an inch apart won't rise as high but will have crisp sides.
Bake 15-18 minutes or until golden brown; you can lightly brush the tops of the biscuits with buttermilk or butter when they're almost done for a nice top crust.
Yum. Biscuits.
But wait!
I promised you gravy! Two kinds, no less!
So, here you go:
The easy way to make either kind of gravy - since they start from the same ingredients - is to fry up ham slices or bacon in a deep frying pan, then remove the meat once cooked.
The other way is to use the frying pan to re-melt / heat up a good portion - say, a half-cup - of lard.
The first gravy here is classic "red-eye" gravy, a Southern staple; you take a Mason jar, pour in a quantity of coffee to match your lard, and add a couple of tablespoons of flour, close, and shake until the flour is completely dissolved; pour this mixture into the frying pan with the melted fat, and stir until it thickens slightly (this gravy should be slightly runny.) You can use hot sauce, fresh hot peppers, plain ol' black pepper, salt, or any combination of the above to taste; just stir 'em in with the rest while it's in the pan.
For the country gravy - the white gravy you see with chicken fried steak all over the south - do the same trick with the Mason jar, only use milk or buttermilk instead of coffee, and slightly more flour.
The rest of the recipe is the same, as is the preparation.
The white gravy should be somewhat thicker than the red-eye gravy. When i was growing up, the white gravy went on biscuits, and the red-eye gravy went on ham slices; that's just me, though, and the red-eye gravy certainly matches the biscuits well enough.
Southern favorites, prepared using only a few modern conveniences, and a few minutes of time; quick, easy, tasty food.
I hope you guys enjoy!
...I will note here that the math tag is because all the nutrition info came in different forms. I did the multiplying and dividing so you don't have to, but feel free to check me; total serving grams of each product divided by 12 for the tablespoon, the sat. fat grams divided by that result, the result of that times six for the final half-cup serving.
