Categories
Fruit Desserts The Book

109. Strawberry Shortcake p.813

The recipe is a variation on this one from epicurious. The main difference is that the linked recipe uses buttermilk biscuits, while The Book calls for the cream biscuits I wrote about the other day.

It starts with three pints of strawberries, hulled and quartered. This is the kind of recipe instruction that I consistently underestimate. I figure this job will take in around 5 minutes, but it’s really more like 20. I’m a chronic under-estimator of time in all areas of life, so I don’t foresee this changing any time soon. Once the strawberries are quartered they’re mixed with sugar, and lightly mashed with a potato masher. The idea is to get them to release their juices without destroying them. I managed to squish out a good deal of juice without breaking more than a few of them. The strawberries are then left to macerate for an hour on the counter.

When the strawberries are swimming in their own juices it’s time to whip the creams. Heavy cream and sour cream are beaten together with some confectioner’s sugar to the soft peak stage. Then the shortcakes are assembled.

The word cake has a specific and circumscribed definition, a biscuit casually topped with whipped cream and fruit doesn’t really fit it. If the biscuits were covered in whipped cream, decoratively layered with strawberries and allowed to set up in the fridge for a while, I’d buy the argument that these are individual serving cakes. As the recipe reads this is no more a cake than a meatloaf sandwich is a hamburger.

Still, this did taste pretty darn good, and it reeked of summer. Our strawberry shortcake growing up had a very similarly textured cake, but it was a large layered affair cut into slices. I fondly remember the adventure of trying to get the slices out in one piece, and the hilarity of mom’s face as strawberries and cream plummeted toward the dining room rug. I missed that in these neat little biscuits, but as I value the carpet in my dining room maybe it’s a compromise I can live with.

As with all deserts in the book, it was too sweet. I even cut back on the recommended amount of sugar on the strawberries because they were naturally sweet and perfectly ripe. 1/3 of a cup was way too much, I should have gone with a couple of tablespoons. The extra sugar helps to pull juice out of the fruit, but it was a bit much. I really liked the sour cream tang in with the whipped cream, which acted as a nice counterpoint to all the sugar on the berries. It worked in the same way the sweet acidity of good balsamic goes with strawberries.

As I said the other day, the biscuits were a great base for this dish. The whipped creams were a winner, and you can’t go wrong with summer fresh strawberries. The Book tried to mess with the perfection of July berries, and ended up taking away from their natural goodness. Summer just wouldn’t be summer without strawberry shortcake, and this version was certainly good enough to fulfill my seasonal need.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

107. Cream Biscuits p.596

No, recipe appears on line, and that’s a shame.

I really enjoyed these biscuits. They’re light but not too fluffy, nicely moist, and just crumbly enough. The recipe is simplicity itself, it’s just flour, baking powder, and salt, mixed with whipping cream. After kneading it for a few seconds it’s patted into a 1/2 inch thick round, and cut into ~3 inch rounds. Then they’re transferred to a baking sheet, brushed with a bit more cream, and popped into a 425 oven for 12-15 minutes.

Early on in the history of Good Eats, Alton Brown had a biscuit episode where his grandmother (mee-maw) came on to show him the proper technique. The recipes there were buttermilk based, but the principles still hold. He emphasized that the most important thing was to use a very sharp cookie cutter, with a decisive push through the dough to avoid compressing the biscuits, and to ensure a good rise. I took that advice to heart, and then completely ignored it when the moment came. I used the dull edge of a drinking glass to cut them out (the recipe calls for a cookie cutter), and my biscuits didn’t rise nearly as much as I’d hoped they would.

The recipe calls for White Lily flour, which that same Good Eats episode tells me is commonly available in the American South, but as far as I know it’s not to be had here. Standard AP flour was given as an alternative, and it worked just fine, these were still absolutely delicious biscuits.

These are probably best suited to sweet applications, because of the straightforward richness of the cream. If I was going to cover biscuits in gravy I’d want the tang of buttermilk to help balance things. The Book uses these as the basis for its strawberry shortcake recipe, and I think they were perfectly suited to the task. I ate some leftovers with some of my homemade strawberry jam and a bit of sharp cheddar, which may have been even better.