Teaching This Old Dog Some New Tricks

As I mentioned before, Older Daughter has taken it upon herself to be our family chef since moving back in with us. She’s been creating some amazingly delicious meals.

Recently she made some biscuits. Just plain ordinary biscuits, using the exact same recipe I’ve used for 30+ years.

But then she taught this old dog a new trick and turned these plain ordinary biscuits into a culinary masterpiece.

She started by dicing cold butter.

Then she worked the butter into the dry ingredients with her fingers. (A pastry blender would also work.)

Here’s all the wet and dry ingredients mixed and ready to roll out.

Here’s where things got interesting. She rolled…

…then folded.

She repeated this step – rolling and folding – several times, to make “layers” in the dough. Whaddaya know. I always just rolled them out once and that’s it.

Then she used an actual biscuit cutter to cut the biscuits. (I always used an upside down tumbler.) Apparently the sharp edges of the biscuit cutter don’t “seal off” the edges of the dough the way a dull tumbler does, so the biscuits puff up into layers.

See the layers?

She finished the batch and popped them into the oven.

The result is flaky puffy biscuits that are out of this world. Who knew?

I realize this is probably old hat to most folks, but it came as a complete revelation to me. So yep, my young pup is teaching this old dog some new tricks. And boy are we enjoying the biscuits.