A Southern biscuit is equal parts comfort and controversy, its quality, authenticity and very classification as a biscuit subject to dispute. Its most crucial ingredient is not flour, fat, leavening or liquid, but nostalgia. The biscuit you ate at your grandmother's knee is the only biscuit there will ever be.
Nevertheless, a number of New York City chefs and bakers have decided in the last few years to devote themselves to the biscuit's tricky art. Takeout shops and restaurants revolving around biscuits have opened in the East Village; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and Astoria, Queens. Small-batch biscuits can be ordered online from independent bakers who may show up on your doorstep or send their husbands to deliver them.
Over the last month, I've sampled biscuits from nine of the newer vendors in town. No two were alike. In their array of sizes, flavours and textures, they were Rorschachs of buttermilk, revealing my prejudices: I tend to favour flaky middles over crispy bottoms, salty over sweet, and biscuits eaten straight, free of such interferences as honey or jam.
Biscuits are personal. Those who champion crunch, sweetness and slathering, please feel free to draw your own conclusions from my descriptions.
All the biscuits I tried shared the tang of buttermilk, and all but one were made with butter rather than lard or shortening. Consideration for (or fear of) vegetarians is partly to blame, although most bakers said they preferred the taste of butter. Some relied on White Lily flour, which is milled from soft winter wheat, has less protein and yields a lighter crumb. It's a Southern staple that's costly to secure northeast of the Mason-Dixon line.
As for the sorcery of their making, everyone I spoke with agreed: keep the ingredients as cold as the tomb. Touch them as little as possible. And don't twist the biscuit cutter, which can hinder the rise.
At BeeHive Oven, which opened in Williamsburg last year, biscuits are served under a Texan flag pinned to the ceiling. Treva Chadwell, who runs the restaurant with her husband, John, grew up in South Texas, where her family goes back eight generations.
Her biscuits are an approximation of her grandmother's, which were flat, with hard, browned bottoms. Chadwell's are taller, sometimes nearly toppling, their slopes suggesting landslides of dough. They have amber lids and interiors that are somehow fluffy and dense at once, delicate yet robust enough to survive when stuffed with fried chicken or shrimp remoulade.
Two blocks south of BeeHive Oven stands Pies 'n' Thighs, a Southern restaurant born in the back room of a biker bar nine years ago and settled at its current address in 2010. (A second location opened in January on the Lower East Side.)
Sarah Sanneh, the head baker, comes from Corona del Mar, Calif. She has Southern roots, but her biscuit recipe was improvised, not inherited. It includes all-purpose flour cut with lower-gluten pastry flour, for airiness; higher-fat European butter, frozen and chopped; and a final brushing with egg and heavy cream.
The resulting biscuits are glories, faintly fissured along the sides, their tops and bottoms gilded like pie crust and close to goldenrod in colour. They start to crumble at the touch. Inside, they have layers like a secret dossier. They're best eaten moments out of the oven, when the liquid in the butter has gone up in steam but still hovers like a ghost.
Annie Etheridge, a 13th-generation south Virginian who can trace her mother's family back to the Jamestown colonist John Rolfe, started selling her biscuits at street fairs a year ago under the name Field & Clover. Baked in a commissary kitchen in Harlem, they were some of the finest I tried, modest in height and gorgeously tender, with seams of tiny air pockets, internal layers like an Elizabethan ruff, and firm, burnished caps and bottoms. There's not a trace of sugar in the dough.
Despite my purist bent, my favourites came with thoughtfully balanced fillings: Cheddar inside dough suffused with black pepper, popping like gunpowder; homemade strawberry-peach jam, smooth and no sweeter than need be; and dark chocolate, like a pain au chocolat, only with enough chocolate for every mouthful.
Fortunately, there's room in the city for more than one person's notion of a biscuit. Why not just praise their proliferation? Chadwell, whose little restaurant lies almost in the shadow of Pies 'n' Thighs, thinks her neighbours' food is delicious.
"They're happy with their biscuits," she said. "I'm happy with mine."
Nevertheless, a number of New York City chefs and bakers have decided in the last few years to devote themselves to the biscuit's tricky art. Takeout shops and restaurants revolving around biscuits have opened in the East Village; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and Astoria, Queens. Small-batch biscuits can be ordered online from independent bakers who may show up on your doorstep or send their husbands to deliver them.
Over the last month, I've sampled biscuits from nine of the newer vendors in town. No two were alike. In their array of sizes, flavours and textures, they were Rorschachs of buttermilk, revealing my prejudices: I tend to favour flaky middles over crispy bottoms, salty over sweet, and biscuits eaten straight, free of such interferences as honey or jam.
Biscuits are personal. Those who champion crunch, sweetness and slathering, please feel free to draw your own conclusions from my descriptions.
All the biscuits I tried shared the tang of buttermilk, and all but one were made with butter rather than lard or shortening. Consideration for (or fear of) vegetarians is partly to blame, although most bakers said they preferred the taste of butter. Some relied on White Lily flour, which is milled from soft winter wheat, has less protein and yields a lighter crumb. It's a Southern staple that's costly to secure northeast of the Mason-Dixon line.
As for the sorcery of their making, everyone I spoke with agreed: keep the ingredients as cold as the tomb. Touch them as little as possible. And don't twist the biscuit cutter, which can hinder the rise.
At BeeHive Oven, which opened in Williamsburg last year, biscuits are served under a Texan flag pinned to the ceiling. Treva Chadwell, who runs the restaurant with her husband, John, grew up in South Texas, where her family goes back eight generations.
Her biscuits are an approximation of her grandmother's, which were flat, with hard, browned bottoms. Chadwell's are taller, sometimes nearly toppling, their slopes suggesting landslides of dough. They have amber lids and interiors that are somehow fluffy and dense at once, delicate yet robust enough to survive when stuffed with fried chicken or shrimp remoulade.
Two blocks south of BeeHive Oven stands Pies 'n' Thighs, a Southern restaurant born in the back room of a biker bar nine years ago and settled at its current address in 2010. (A second location opened in January on the Lower East Side.)
Sarah Sanneh, the head baker, comes from Corona del Mar, Calif. She has Southern roots, but her biscuit recipe was improvised, not inherited. It includes all-purpose flour cut with lower-gluten pastry flour, for airiness; higher-fat European butter, frozen and chopped; and a final brushing with egg and heavy cream.
The resulting biscuits are glories, faintly fissured along the sides, their tops and bottoms gilded like pie crust and close to goldenrod in colour. They start to crumble at the touch. Inside, they have layers like a secret dossier. They're best eaten moments out of the oven, when the liquid in the butter has gone up in steam but still hovers like a ghost.
Annie Etheridge, a 13th-generation south Virginian who can trace her mother's family back to the Jamestown colonist John Rolfe, started selling her biscuits at street fairs a year ago under the name Field & Clover. Baked in a commissary kitchen in Harlem, they were some of the finest I tried, modest in height and gorgeously tender, with seams of tiny air pockets, internal layers like an Elizabethan ruff, and firm, burnished caps and bottoms. There's not a trace of sugar in the dough.
Despite my purist bent, my favourites came with thoughtfully balanced fillings: Cheddar inside dough suffused with black pepper, popping like gunpowder; homemade strawberry-peach jam, smooth and no sweeter than need be; and dark chocolate, like a pain au chocolat, only with enough chocolate for every mouthful.
Fortunately, there's room in the city for more than one person's notion of a biscuit. Why not just praise their proliferation? Chadwell, whose little restaurant lies almost in the shadow of Pies 'n' Thighs, thinks her neighbours' food is delicious.
"They're happy with their biscuits," she said. "I'm happy with mine."
© 2015 The New York Times