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How to bake a better biscuit
Hello, friends. It’s a holiday weekend, tomorrow being a day of service in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That makes today a good day to gather and share food, as Dr. King often did with family, friends and those who fought peacefully alongside him for freedom and justice. I’ll be making a batch of Edna Lewis’s biscuits. Through her seminal cookbooks, she celebrated Black Southern country cooking with soulful recipes, detailing the finer points for flawless dishes. For example, to ensure these biscuits from her book “The Taste of Country Cooking” don’t have the metallic aftertaste that commercial baking powder sometimes imparts, she suggests you make your own, sifting two parts cream of tartar with one part baking soda. Miss Lewis, as she was known, used lard that was naturally rendered from pig fat for incredibly flaky and savory biscuits. If you can’t find good leaf lard from a farm or butcher, your best bet is to substitute cold butter. The biscuits will still come out tender, with the round richness of milky fat. If you can find it, use White Lily flour, which she recommends in “The Gift of Southern Cooking.” It’s finely milled from soft red winter wheat, which has a lower protein content. When mixed with liquid, the protein in flour forms gluten, which makes dough stretchy and strong. That’s great for a chewy, crusty sourdough, but not for biscuits. Using flour with a lower percentage of protein allows you to gently knead your biscuit dough and still end up with feathery, soft layers under the delicate crackle on top. If you can’t find White Lily, try pastry or cake flour instead. Featured Recipe Edna Lewis’s BiscuitsThese biscuits need nothing more than butter and jam, preferably Miss Lewis’s strawberry preserves, to be a wonderful breakfast. For lunch, you can serve them with field peas and snaps or collard greens. And for Sunday dinner, try one of Dr. King’s favorites: He enjoyed eating the chef Leah Chase’s gumbo from her New Orleans restaurant Dooky Chase with fellow civil rights leaders. That’s a great pot, prime for sharing. And for the rest of the week: Spicy paprika chicken and potato stew: In the recipe comments, Ken, a reader, summed up why you might want this now: “I made a double recipe on a very cold Sunday afternoon in January. It was the perfect thing to fight back the cold and invigorate.” Christian Reynoso applies the tomato-based spicy sweetness of chicken paprikash to a soupier stew with tender golden potatoes. His clever technique of halving boneless chicken breasts crosswise before simmering them keeps the lean meat juicy even when the soup is reheated throughout the week. One-pot salmon, spinach and lentil salad: As good warm as it is room temperature, this lemony dish makes for a lovely Sunday brunch, and any leftovers pack nicely for weekday lunches. Kay Chun calls for canned lentils so you can pull the meal together in half an hour, but if you have time, you can simmer a pot of dried ones. Even though the recipe already calls for a lot of dill, I tend to add even more. Pressure cooker beef pho: This is one of the best uses of a pressure cooker, turning out a fragrant pho broth in under an hour. If you have the whole day to spare, you can try this traditional long-cooked version. Otherwise, you’ll be grateful for Andrea Nguyen’s pressure cooker version, adapted by Kim Severson. I use my stovetop Instant Pot and skip the optional additional rare beef because the braised brisket that comes from the broth is delicious enough. Roasted kelewele (spiced plantains) with crispy shallots and herbs: Often, oven versions of fried foods can’t compare in satisfying crispness, but this dish from Yewande Komolafe achieves that feat. A popular street food in Ghana, kelewele typically starts with marinating ripe plantains and ends with frying them into caramelized, crisp chunks. Here, they’re roasted with seasonings before a final blast under the broiler. Fried shallots add crunch, and black beans turn this into a satisfying meal. Homemade protein bars: I first developed these so that I could have a handy snack while out hiking, biking or skiing. Black pepper brings a complex warmth to the nuts and the earthy maple sweetness. Even after 14 tests, I found the bars could crumble, depending on the brand of nut butter. To ensure they stay totally intact, bake the pressed mixture at 350 degrees for 10 minutes before cutting it into bars. They’ll be firmer and chewier than the original version. If you go for the lighter no-bake taste and texture and then your bars come apart, you can pop the crumbles into your mouth or sprinkle them over yogurt. Thanks for reading!
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