Biscuits are Bad

Biscuits are bad. Settle down, British people, I’m not talking about cookies. I mean American-style biscuits, the bland doughy lumps of crap you’re supposed to “enjoy” with your awful flour-paste “sawmill gravy.” The dry crumbly garbage-bread that disintegrates if you attempt to so much as butter it, let alone put a fried egg inside it, and leaves you covered in crumbs even if you don’t.

How you imagine biscuits are (left) vs. How biscuits actually are (right)

Biscuits are terrible. They’re not terrible because they were made badly, or because I haven’t had the right kind. They’re terrible because of what they are. Biscuits are inherently bad. There is no way to make a good biscuit. Biscuits are the particle board of bread, and they should be abandoned like the British navy abandoned hardtack (and involuntary sodomy).

Let’s look at a biscuit recipe by television Southerner and living photographic negative Paula Deen:

Flour, baking powder, butter, milk, and a tiny bit of salt and sugar. Did you ever eat paste in school? It was a taste explosion compared to this list of all the bland, white things in your kitchen. And do we give it time to develop the flour starches into c0mplex and tasty sugars? Does it have any yeast to make it anything but a bowl of crumbly glop? Hell no! We’re just gonna mix that crap together and then dry it out real fast in the oven, like we were making bricks, but less tasty.

And let’s just gloss right over what kind of backwoods yokel has hot coals in their oven.

“But you have to make creeeeeeeammmmmm biscuiiiiiiits,” I can already hear you whining. Ok, here’s what’s in cream biscuits:

Note the difference. It calls for cream instead of milk and butter. Do you know what cream is? It’s the part of milk that’s in milk, plus the part of milk that’s in butter. This is the exact same shit as regular biscuits.

It is crucial, in making biscuits, that you not over-mix or over-knead the dough, because then they get hard and tough. But the lack of kneading (and time) means no elastic gluten can form to hold them together. That’s why biscuits are crumbly. It is in their nature. It is part of what a biscuit is. Trying to make any kind of sandwich with a biscuit is like trying to make a house out of styrofoam packing peanuts.

Mmm mmm time for a delicious biscuit sammy– OH NO

There is, in fact, only one edible kind of biscuit, and it’s this space-age pressurized chemical mucilage right here:

Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Water, Soybean Oil, Sugar, Baking Powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate). Contains 2% or less of: Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Whey, Xanthan Gum, Natural and Artificial Flavor.

Nothing so fab as something from the lab. Eat up!