The hearts are cute! :) But, wow, Amylou, this is exactly the kind of recipe I was looking for. I'm pretty sure my old recipe had milk rather than buttermilk (with the BP I think it's more about flavor and texture than acid being required for the rise). I will definitely try this. Thank-you!

I've heard of beaten biscuits -- an old recipe and there is even a beaten biscuit "machine" to make them so perhaps that is what you're talking about?

Amylou: thank you for posting this recipe. I've been wondering where my ages-old recipe for this type of biscuit had gone. This sounds the same.

Thank you Amylou! I am going to try these. I keep looking and trying biscuit recipes, and still haven't found one that gives me the biscuits I want, though all have tasted good.

I pat the dough together, and fold a few times to get the layers and then form into a ball and pat or roll out and cut with a biscuit cutter.

Recipe

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).

Plllog, I actually don't use a FP. I use a big pink mason cash bowl with hearts on it and a cheese grater to grate the ice cold buttah into the flour. (Thats another thing. I don't use butter,only BUTTAH!!!!) :)

Good to know, Amylou. If i only have hard frozen butter (I'm afraid I only have butter, not buttah, but it's good organic happy butter), I'll just put the flour et al. in the FP bowl and use the grating disk on the butter, then combine by hand. My ceramic mixing bowls are puttied (with Earthquake putty) on a high shelf because they take too much washing water, so it's a French glass (Arc) DW safe bowl for me! Your hearts bowl makes a pretty theme with the heart biscuit cutter. :)

That what I do with mine. I mix the ingredients by hand, use a bench scraper to fold it over in thirds, roll, turn halfway, fold into thirds again and roll. They have such flaky layers when I do that.