Julie, try number two was NOT good! I thought I'd try a different type of flour and so used Italian "00" flour - which is typically used to make pizzas, breads, pastas, etc. The dough just didn't rise and was quite bubbly. So, today I figured I would go back to basics. My mother was one of the best cooks Ive known and she used good old fashioned Five Roses flour always, for everything (and being Italian, of course she made pasta, bread and the worlds best pizza :-) Success! Although the dough did not rise as quickly as it did for Trailrunner (took closer to three hours), and I did need to add the full amount of water, the results were yummy. Much less dense than the first time, light, lots of great texture, and surprisingly easy to work with. I brought over two partially baked crusts still warm from the oven to a friend's tonight and had fun making a Hawaiian pizza with her four year old and a "grown up" one for the adults to munch on with drinks before dinner. Eliz

Well, for as tired/sleepy as I am, I had a great giggle over all the comments! Please excuse any typos I might make. Made the mistake of cutting grass at noon. Not a good idea! Lou, thank you for the offer. I may take you up on it. Don't know how soon I'll get to them. We have our BIG family campout/antique gas hit an miss engine/steam show in a couple of weeks. I have the honor of getting two motor homes ready, preping any food in advance that I can, and do most of the cooking while there. Mom and Dad are only able to go if we all do all the work. DB & DSIL may not even be able to go this year, due to starting a new business. It's only about 20 minutes away for all of us, but if DB has classes, he can't close the studio. DD will help as much as she can, so will DS IF he doesn't have to work. Last count, with invited guests/famiy/friends, was 22 I think. Dad & I will move in on Wed. Show starts on Fri. Some prep we will do on Thurs, and have a steak fry that night. Breakfast menu so far is home fries by request, eggs, pancakes (the only thing besides a little meat of choice mom will eat for breakfst), bacon sausage, or ham. Lunch ham sandwiches. Fri night is chili, burgers for those who don't want chili. Sat same for breakfast and lunch. Supper is burgers and dogs. Potato salad for whatever meal anyone wants. Dad wants cauliflower with cheese on Thurs. Raw veggies available anytime. Sunday is leftovers! Any of you who want to sneak in, the WILL be plenty of food. I ALWAYS have food to bring home! Ann, no, wrong side of the family, tho my aunt did make them with that dough. Yummy! Lars, the whatever you called it sauce is cause I also asked for a cheese sauce to put over the cauliflower. Dad is remembering how his mom cooked! By the time I can remember her cooking, she was getting too sick for me to learn from her. Your cinnamon rolls sound fantastic, but I don't have the energy to go to that much work. Now, before I fall asleep at the computer, I'm headed for bed! I'm already wore out before the show even gets here! My fault. But I was trying to beat the rain on radar that ended up only being a few sprinkles. I'll get caught up on sleep and be off and running again. Then I'll sleep in a lot the following week! I'm happy to try to spoil him. We don't know how many more times they will be able to go. I said last year, I was going to do this the easy way this year. Well, the meat for the chili will be cooked and seasoned ahead and frozen. The burger patties will be made and frozen ahead. I'm taking the old roaster and dumping every thing in that for the chili and letting it go most of the day. Ham will go in a crock pot on warm with a bit of water for lunches first thing in the morning and they can eat lunch whenever! Will have to keep watch of Mom. She doesn't always know it's her sugar droppign when she doesn't feel good. Dad knows his. And yes, I know the cinnamon rolls aren't a good idea, but he will compensate for the treat. That's why I spoil him that weekend. Thanks all. Tami

Grandma never cut a biscuit either, she just pinched off a piece, shaped it a bit with her hands and dropped it onto her baking pan. She always made sure that the sides touched a bit so they didn't spread out too much. If she actually wanted something that looked "fancier" she patted the dough into a square and cut it with a knife into biscuit sized squares, then baked. Her biscuits were the best. My biscuits are good, but they ain't Grandma's that's for sure. I love hot biscuits with butter and honey, though, so I make them anyway and wish Grandma were here to show me how ONE MORE TIME. Sigh. At any rate, overhandling the dough is the biggest problem most people encounter. The fat must be very cold and I've never made a biscuit worth a tinker's dam* in the food processor. I use an old fashioned pastry cutter to cut in the fat, Grandma used two knives. I always use buttermilk, even if I have to buy it especially for biscuits. Sometimes I add cheese, sometimes not, and I've occasionally made and liked sweet potato biscuits and a spicy chipotle biscuit that Caliloo posted from Bon Appetit: CORNMEAL BISCUITS WITH CHEDDAR AND CHIPOTLE 1 tablespoon unsalted butter 3/4 cup (packed) chopped green onions 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour 1/2 cup yellow cornmeal 2 tablespoons sugar 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon coarse kosher salt 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes 1 1/2 cups (packed) coarsely grated yellow extra-sharp cheddar cheese 1 large egg 3/4 cup (about) buttermilk 1 tablespoon finely minced canned chipotle chiles in adobo* 1 egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon whipping cream (for glaze) Position rack in center of oven; preheat to 425°F. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add green onions and sauté 2 minutes to soften slightly. Remove from heat. Blend flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in processor. Add 1/2 cup chilled butter; cut in using on/off turns until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add cheese; cut in using on/off turns. Transfer flour mixture to large bowl. Whisk 1 egg in glass measuring cup. Add enough buttermilk to egg to measure 1 cup; stir in green-onion mixture and chipotles. Make well in center of dry ingredients. Pour buttermilk mixture into well; mix just until evenly moistened. Turn dough out onto generously floured surface. Knead gently just until dough holds together, about 10 turns. Pat out on generously floured surface to 3/4-inch-thick round. Using 3-inch round cutter, cut out biscuits. Transfer to ungreased baking sheet, spacing 1 inch apart. Gather dough scraps; pat out to 3/4-inch thickness and cut out additional biscuits. Brush biscuits with egg glaze. Bake biscuits until golden, tester inserted into center comes out clean, and biscuits feel firm, about 18 minutes. Cool on rack 5 minutes. Serve warm. Makes about 10. Bon Appétit March 2006 Good luck. The only way you can ever make a good biscuit is with practice. Yummy, yummy practice. LOL Annie

Thanks, Ann! This reads like a hybrid between the two types. I'll definitely give it a try. As one would expect, your biscuits are lovely. ;) Martha, I'm not familiar with "beaten biscuits". Amylou's linked recipe is pretty much the method I used to use though a wire pastry blender rather than an FP (I don't remember the proportions at all). It sounds a bit baking powder heavy, but I can tweak if it's not just right. It's a good starting place. Ann's biscuits sound like a good blend of not worked and folded. So, of course, I looked beaten biscuits up. :) Talking about developing gluten!! Garden & Gun has a very amusing article about them, starting: The beaten biscuit doesn’t disintegrate into buttery crumbs. It lacks the tang of buttermilk and the lightness of baking powder. It’s a dense holdover from the antebellum era that can require more than an hour of hard work, or a bulky, nearly extinct piece of equipment. Then continues after awhile with: While the delicate crumb of the buttermilk biscuit requires pampering from mixing bowl to oven to table, the work of beaten biscuit–making is prolonged and violent, and was often left to enslaved cooks in centuries past. To create layers in the dough, bakers armed with rolling pins, axe handles, and even hammers whomp and fold it until it resembles a blistered hunk of putty, anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. Those hard-earned layers inflate just slightly in a hot oven, releasing steam through the holes traditionally poked into each biscuit with a fork. The effect doesn’t compare to that of baking powder, but a little bit of rise was better than no rise all for nineteenth-century bakers without ready access to leaveners. And today, proponents of the beaten biscuit say that its firm texture and unobtrusive flavor are the reasons why it pairs better with country ham than its flakier kin. “In Europe, you eat ham with crackers,” Worley says. “Beaten biscuits have that crackery texture, and they’re more neutral than buttermilk biscuits. People either get it or they don’t.” https://gardenandgun.com/recipe/the-art-of-the-beaten-biscuit/ Thank-you, Martha, for introducing this to me. When I was talking about the firmer texture, I meant something like what Ann shows. There's some directionality to the crumb, and it's not so melt in your mouth. Trailrunner's biscuits are cut, but barely patted into a cuttable mass. Their texture is more like drop biscuits, but fluffier, at least as I make them, and they're very lofty (loads of water and high heat).