What if I told you that you could have these delicious pillows of fluff from idea to fruition within thirty minutes? That you wouldn’t have to touch a rolling pin or try to find a biscuit cutter? That you wouldn’t have to futz with flour on your counters?
These slightly adapted Drop Biscuits from Shutterbean are just pure magic and they come together so fast with the most humble list of ingredients. I highly, highly recommend.
Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, cut into tiny pieces
3/4 – 1 cup milk
Directions:
Preheat oven to 450.
Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt until well-combined.
Cut in the butter. I use my (very clean!) hands to do this. Basically, I make sure the butter gets coated in flour as soon as I break it up. You want it to flake into tiny pieces, so I mush the butter up and then I toss it in the flour, mush it up, toss it in the flour, you get the picture. Try to handle the flour as very little as possible so that your biscuits stay flaky.
Once the butter is pretty well mixed with the flour, add the milk. You want to use just enough milk to make your dough wet, but not mushy. It’s a fine line. Start with 3/4 of a cup and add a little bit more if you need it. In all, I used a full cup of 1% milk. You might need a little less if you use milk with a higher fat percentage.
Bake for about 12-15 minutes until they turn a delightful golden brown.
I fried a couple of eggs in butter to go with mine and had one of my biscuits with blackberry jam. All was well in my world.
Do you like biscuits? This was a my first time making drop biscuits and I am absolutely smitten!
There’s this moment when I’m cooking something new and I pull it out of the oven to check on it, perhaps I do a little taste test on a fork and the food it too hot and I’m doing deep breaths to try not to burn my mouth. In that moment, I just know that I turned a culinary corner. I made something so delicious that I amazed my own self.
Not to oversell it, but that’s the way I felt when I cooked this barbacoa. It was so incredibly good that I almost wanted to cry and I felt this little thrill of awe that I could cook something so nurturing and complex and hearty and just so damn delicious.
We’ve been in a bit of a chicken rut in my house lately, so I wanted to make some beef. After cooking this barbacoa, I am now on a vegetarian and healthy bend because I’m afraid I almost gave myself gout eating meat for several meals in a row, but anyway. We were in a chicken rut and I swear I decided to learn to cook barbacoa just out of thin air. I don’t know where the inspiration came from, but it was suddenly there and palpable.
Whenever I’m cooking something new, I do a stupid amount of research before I commit to a recipe. That’s why I’m so proud of my Damn Delicious posts. Sure, I’m just sharing another person’s recipe most of the time, but I’m not just sharing it, I’m vouching for it. I’m putting my picky, food-loving name behind it. I’m making you a promise that it’s worth the time and effort. It’s so disappointing to invest the time and energy and resources into a recipe for it to just be ho-hum. I don’t have time for that and neither do you!
So, trust me when I say that this recipe for homemade barbacoa is going to knock your socks off. Truly. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever cooked. Yep, I will be so bold to say that. The recipe comes from Give me Some Oven and I’m confident you could follow her slow-cooker method and find awesome results. Me? Of course I had to modify it, so here’s what I did:
I went through the extra step of blending all of the ingredients minus the meat and the Bay Leaf in my food processor. If you do this, beware and blend in small batches because it’s a pretty liquidy process. I had a leaksplosion with my food processor. I also added about half a cup of orange juice and a tablespoon of honey because someone in the comments mentioned that it’s more traditional to add that and I happened to have them on hand.
I didn’t plan ahead enough to cook in the slow cooker, so I used my oven. I don’t have a dutch oven, so I cooked in my trusty cast iron skillet covered with aluminum foil for about 45 minutes at 425 degrees and then turned it down to 350 for about two hours.
I went ahead and seared the meat for about five minutes or so on each side before putting it in the oven because I was going for maximum flakiness and nuance. Once seared, I poured over the sauce and popped it in the oven with the aluminum foil covering. I honestly forgot the Bay Leaf, but if you remember, I’d recommend you add it. It can’t hurt.
At first, it isn’t going to seem like the meat is going to get tender. It stays in the two inch chunks for quite some time – at least an hour and a half. Be patient and trust the process. Over time, the meat will just fall apart into the most tender, flaky pieces. After I shredded the meat, I put it back in the oven for a bit so that some pieces could brown further. Gah, so good!
Now, of course you can put that barbacoa on anything. Nachos, burrito bowls, you name it, you can’t go wrong. But, if you happen to have extra time on your hands (Corona virus shelter in place, what!) and want to try your hand at homemade tortillas, I am going to fully support your decision. You will be my tortilla hero.
I love a homemade tortilla more than most things in life, but I had never worked up the nerve to try them for myself, mostly because I was intimidated by lard. I found a recipe that honestly was so easy that called for olive oil instead of lard via The Cafe Sucre Farine. I was intrigued, so I decided to use my limited stock of flour to give them a go.
Holy crap, these tortillas were delicious. They are little pillows of heaven and they couldn’t be any easier to make. The Kitchenaid will do all the work for you aside from a little rolling pin action. Be sure to give them the adequate rest time before you pull out the rolling pin and don’t be afraid to really get in there and roll them out super thin. That’s going to keep it more like a tortilla versus a pita.
All you need is tortilla + barbacoa + maybe a little cilantro and diced onion to have a very memorable meal. Keep it simple my friends.
Please let me know in the comments if you decide to make this! I would love to hear of your culinary triumph and I will live vicariously through your recount. I love cooking so much and love nothing more than when you make a recipe I recommend. Happy cooking, friends!
The shelves may still be ransacked and it may be impossible to meal plan right now, but that isn’t keeping me from dreaming up all kinds of food I want to try my hand at while I have so much extra time on my hands.
People are calling it ‘procrastibaking’, but I’m calling it all of my food dreams coming true. I finally feel like I have the energy to pursue my love for cooking and expand my skills. I am keeping a running list of ingredients I’ll need. I comb the shelves when I go to the grocery store once a week or so for anything I can gather. Yeast and flour is hard to come by these days, but if that’s my main ‘problem’ right now, I feel super grateful.
Here’s my current cooking and baking bucket list:
Challah Bread
Barbacoa Meat
Homemade Tortillas
Chicken Gumbo
Biscuits (both drop and rolled)
Cheesecake Brownies
Homemade Pasta
Chocolate Banana Bread
Cacio e Pepe
Broccoli Cheddar Soup
Oven Roasted Chicken
London Broil
French Silk Pie
Dutch Baby Pancake
That’s all I can think of for now and I think that’s plenty enough to get started. I already made the barbacoa and tortillas for dinner last night and it was the meal of my dreams. I’ll write tomorrow to let you know more about it…until then, please let me know: are you procrastibaking, too? What are you making? Do you have anything else you think I should add? After I perfected French Onion Soup a few weeks ago, I feel like the sky is my culinary limit!
