The totally miserable and completely wonderful pursuit of perfection, told through cheese biscuits
As a perfectionist, that two of my greatest (or maybe my only) hobbies are writing and cooking feels like a bad practical joke. I have a habit of inflicting pain upon myself. By choosing these both I’ve signed myself up for a lifetime of aggravation over tins, bowls, basins, plates, half-melted butter.
I didn’t start out baking cheese biscuits. I started out with scones, infused with lemon rinds and slightly tart rose petals. But then as cooks are wont to do I followed a craving back home. Cooking and writing are similar for me, both a way of retreading and excavating my childhood to understand why certain things affect me so much in the present day. I swapped the lemon rinds and rose petals for cheese, and after much reading modified the recipe until it looked like the biscuits most of you are familiar with now.
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The first biscuit I ever tried came in a family meal bucket from the KFC out on County Road, just steps from the Italian deli and Rita’s shaved ice. I remember it as light and pillowy. Its lightly browned top and delicately layers crumbled just enough upon meeting gelatinous, off-color gravy, and I can clearly remember each puff of steam that emerged with each hasty bite. It was just perfect, and that’s the problem. Nostalgia has perfected its taste and texture, and as you probably know nothing is ever actually quite as exquisite as we remember it. My mind understands this. Yet still, my hands remain obstinate. To this day I tweak, note, laminate, and bake in pursuit of that very first biscuit’s taste and texture.
Some of the factors I’ve screwed around with:
Protein content: The flour used most widely in the American South was made of soft wheat, which has a lower protein content than hard wheat. White Lily, a popular brand used to make these biscuits (and possibly a cult classic nowadays) has a reported protein content of 6-8%, whereas “regular” flour has a protein content of anywhere from 10-14%. My most recent batch of biscuits used Yokozuna flour from Sriboga, which came in a package that said 11g of protein despite being advertised as having a max protein of 9%.
Amount of leavening agents: Buttermilk isn’t readily available here, so I’ve made do with vinegar and fresh milk left to rest in a cool place for several minutes. Also, this may seem obvious but just take it (again) from me. Adding too much baking powder — especially baking powder that’s gone bad — will lead to biscuits with a metallic and almost prickly taste.
Baking times: The reason I’m experimenting with baking times is because, more often than not, the centers of my biscuits are never quite as fluffy as I want them to be. Biscuits are supposed to be done in an oven within 15 or maximum 20 minutes, yet I’ve only ever experienced fractional successes with baking times of at least 35 minutes. You can imagine this is very aggravating.
Baking temperatures and oven settings: For months I’d been using my oven’s convection setting, which blows a continuous stream of air throughout the oven. Hot air contributes to crust formation, which ultimately inhibits oven spring. While reading up on the history of biscuits and White Lily flour the epiphany came to me: maybe that was why my biscuits weren’t getting as much rise as I wanted. Southern grandmas tended to bake their biscuits in a cast iron pan or skillet, sans air circulation. Since then, I’ve used a mix of convention (heat, no fan) and convection (heat, with fan) for biscuits.
Fat: The very first iterations of the cheese biscuits used a 50:50 mix of margarine (Blue Band and/or Palmia) with butter. I’ve since abandoned the blend for 100% butter, but in the back of my mind I’m always wondering if I should try introducing vegetable shortening. I can’t try lard since I’m localizing the biscuits for guests and everyday consumers.
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It’s a Zenonian racecourse, a paradox of motion. If you’re not familiar: an asshole Greek philosopher said, assume you are tasked with moving from 0 to 10. Seems simple enough. But, he said, you can never actually reach 10 because you first have to reach the halfway point, which is 5. And then you would have to reach the halfway point between 5 and 10, which is 7.5. And then you would have to reach the halfway point of 7.5 and 10 which is 8.75. And each halfway point would get progressively smaller and smaller, preventing you from ever actually reaching 10 — at best you could probably reach 9.9999999999 (ad infinitum). That’s how I feel about these cheese biscuits. I’ll never get to 10.
Chasing perfection isn’t always a bad thing. So many have loved the biscuits in my stead. And that love has opened up so many chances for me to befriend this city and its people. And so I keep trying. It’s not like I haven’t made any progress.
To cook and to write — to create at all, actually — is to pursue perfection. By agonizing over cheese biscuits I continue a centuries-old baking practice, taking a place among a consortium of matrons that windowpanes across time and space. I’m trying to keep something my husband said at the turn of 2023 in mind: “It’s okay to feel that you haven’t achieved greatness because that will make you keep pursuing greatness.”
And sure, that is actually comforting. It’s not so bad knowing that every person who has ever cooked for their loved ones has pretty much moved through these same motions.I recall also a comment I read on some baking forum: “That was how our grandmas did it. Tried and tweaked each batch until they tasted something worth writing down.”