My granny made big, fluffy cathead biscuits nearly every day of my childhood. But until last week it had been literally years since I baked my own. That’s when I revived the wonderful tradition of breakfast for dinner.
For about a year in the early 1990s, I baked Hardee’s biscuits for a living, and I can tell those who might turn up their nose at fast food that they are pretty close to homemade.
But when I went to bake my own at home the other night, I decided to go with locally-milled flour from Big Spring Mill in Elliston, Virginia. Watch the flour get made here…
I’ve lived in the New River Valley of Virginia for about 18 years now, and didn’t know about this famous maker of southern biscuit flour sitting about 20 miles from my front door until about a year ago when a friend gave me a community cookbook from West Virginia. The biscuit recipe in there calls by name for Big Spring Mill’s “Virginia’s Best A No. 1″ biscuit flour.
Bill Long, whose family has owned the mill since 1935 (it was first opened in 1850 by a different family), told me recently they make the flour from soft spring wheat that is milled in four stages and sifted three times, then bagged by hand. It’s soft and light, and when mixed with cream to make the easiest of all biscuit recipes — cream biscuits — it produces a rich pastry that’s good night or day, hot or cold, sweet or savory.
Wheat is classified in several ways, including by color, by growing season, by protein and gluten content and by milling technique. Soft spring wheat is low in protein and gluten, perfect for biscuits, pancakes and other pastry-type uses.
I can’t remember what flour my granny used, but it was probably White Lilly or Gold Medal from Horton’s Grocery in Galax — our corner grocery store then.
We ate those biscuits in the early morning covered in hot cream gravy seasoned with sausage (when granny was cooking) or bacon (when popaw made breakfast). After supper, we had them for dessert with cream and frozen strawberries we picked every summer in North Carolina and put up to get us through winter.
On special occasions, we had fried salmon cakes with our biscuits and gravy, either for breakfast or dinner, and in the summer we added slices of popaw’s homegrown Mr. Stripey tomatoes to our steaming plates.
But always there were biscuits.
Looking back, I’m surprised we had biscuits so often because my granny hated to make messes. She couldn’t stand crumbs to get on the floor and scolded you if you happened to accidentally rake some off the table. Nothing got fried in a skillet without her first draping a paper towel over the pan to protect her shiny stovetop from grease spatter. She certainly never floured a counter and rolled out biscuits, Rather, she came up with her own “plop and pat” method.
First, she greased and floured a cookie sheet, then quickly mixed the dough in a large bowl. Using a big metal spoon, she scooped out biscuit-sized daubs of the mixture and plopped them down on the cookie sheet about two inches apart. The final step was to dip her spoon in flour and use the back of it to pat the dough into large rounds. They came out light and fluffy and huge.
Another old lady I knew years ago had a similar technique for mess-free biscuits. She made her dough in a big bowl. Rather than rolling out and cutting the biscuits, though, she tore off pieces of the dough, dipped them in flour and rolled and patted them out like hamburgers.
After making biscuits and gravy for dinner the other night, I see why people devise these techniques. It seems like a simple meal, but it produces an amazing number of dirty dishes and deposits a fine mist of flour over everything in the vicinity, including the baker.
But no matter the mess, this meal is worth the trouble.
Tags: baking, Big Spring Mill, Biscuits, cream biscuits, Elliston, flour, Hardee's, quick bread, Virginia's Best
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