Few ingredients, max pleasure, all comfort. This is the biscuit recipe we need right now
Lately, I have found myself with a lot of time but little capacity for adventurous baking projects. I could be nursing a sourdough starter or leaning into my craft and developing new recipes, but I just don’t have it in me.
I still crave buttery baked goods on a daily basis, though, and so I have returned to the simple, pleasurable baking projects of my youth. My mom and grandma used to make drop biscuits a lot: Few ingredients, a very quick turnaround time and maximum pleasure make this kind of comfort baking a soothing and attainable weekly practice. They are easy enough for a child to make, or a grown person who has never baked a thing in his or her life.
They are the anti-mile-high biscuit, ugly and uneven, but they have a tender crumb that elicits the primal joy of biting into something very delicious — all we can really ask of a biscuit, right? You can toss in some frozen blueberries and make them into scones. You can make them larger and stuff them with eggs and bacon — a larger drop biscuit is referred to as a “cathead” biscuit in the South. Whatever they are, they make me happy, and they scratch the itch to bake when I just can’t be bothered to do much else but stir and scoop.
