Drop Biscuits Recipe So Easy
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This Drop Biscuits recipe that is always considered a treat at my house, met with the same zeal as a dessert even though it is just a bread.
Similar to Hoe Cake
A variation on my Mama’s hoe cake, she often mixed up the same batter and made drop biscuits instead. When I first served hoe cake to my in laws, hot from the oven with generous helpings of homemade apple butter, they declared it a hit. They loved the crispy outer layer and soft as clouds biscuit inside. But the next day when I made them drop biscuits with buttermilk and they assured me that the drop biscuits with apple butter were their new favorite.
Recipe Ingredients:
- Self rising flour
- Vegetable shortening (I like to use Coconut oil these days but use what you want)
- Buttermilk (you can use regular milk if you like)
- Some vegetable oil for the pan
Isn’t it amazing how all of the best Southern recipes have the fewest and most simple of ingredients?
Now take your ugliest baking sheet, one with a bit of a lip around the edges, and pour some vegetable oil on it.
You just need enough to coat the bottom.
Use Your Ugliest Baking Pan 🙂
You know that really ugly baking sheet you have that you make sure you don’t use when company comes? That is the one we want for this. Mine is so old and ugly I covered it in foil so you wouldn’t see! Bless it’s little heart, its a workhorse of a pan though! I normally do not cover my pan in foil so don’t feel that you have to.
Place that baking pan in your oven while it preheats to get the oil good and hot.
Measure your flour into a bowl.
Add your shortening.
Cut your shortening into the flour by repeatedly pressing down with a fork and stirring it up a bit as you do so.
Long Tined Fork Does Just Fine
I’ve mentioned before that you can buy a fancy pastry cutter for this but I find a long tined fork works just as well and I don’t have one more thing to keep up with. Simple is better here at Bountiful.
It’ll look like this when you are done.
Now pour in your buttermilk.
I used the very last bit of milk I had for these drop biscuits! Been so busy lately I haven’t had time to get groceries.
Stir it up until you have a batter that is just a little softer than regular biscuit batter.
It will be lumpy but that is perfectly fine so don’t go frettin’ over it.
Drop globs by large spoonful onto heated baking sheet.
The oil should be hot enough to sizzle a little bit when you add the batter.
How Do I Get The Tops Crunchy?
Tilt your pan a bit until some of the heated oil pools in the corner and spoon a bit of that oil over each biscuit.
This will get us nice and crunchy tops!
Here are our drop biscuits all ready to go.
These are pretty good sized ones and this recipe ended up making about eight of them.
If you make them a little smaller you could get a dozen.
Bake at 425 until golden brown, 10-15 minutes.
Ingredients
- 2 cups self rising flour
- 1 cup buttermilk any milk will do
- 1/2 cup vegetable shortening I used coconut oil but use what you like
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425. Pour a thin layer of oil to cover the bottom of a large baking pan and place in oven to heat.
- Cut shortening into flour well. Pour buttermilk in and stir until wet – add a little more milk if needed.
- Drop by large spoonfuls onto well heated pan and spoon a bit of hot oil over each one.
- Bake for ten to fifteen minutes or until browned.
Nutrition
You may also enjoy these biscuit recipes:
Sausage Biscuit with Cheese Southern Style
Buttermilk Biscuit Recipe Light and Buttery
Garlic Cream Biscuits with Bacon Gravy
Happiness is like potato salad,
when shared with others – it becomes a picnic!
Submitted by Southern Plate reader, Kathi.
This particular post really tugged at my heart strings for the many people who posted about their mothers who are no longer with us. I still have my mother and for that I am thankful. However I cannot tell you about her wonderful cooking but I can share some pretty funny times when she tried to cook.
My mother worked two jobs the entire time I was growing up in order to take care of my brother and I. Whenever she would get a day off she would attempt to cook us a real meal and sometimes it was actually good but most of the time is was what I refer to as flash cooked…black on the outside and raw on the inside lol. Her biscuits have been the highlight of many a joke in our home…thank God she can take the humor. You see, when my momma made biscuits they would turn out really. really hard and have these little knobby dark bumps all over them. My brother and me used to say that they had the measles and mumps haha.
Anyhow, I can remember one time my brother had a friend over for the night and the next morning Mom attempted her biscuits as a “special” treat for us. As usual the biscuits turned out more like rocks than clouds. On this particular day it was raining outside and we couldn’t go out and play. Being the crafty kids that we were, we decided that we would play wiffle ball in the house…well it was actually a trailer, so we had a nice long hall way to play in. We had the wiffle bat (plastic bat for those who don’t know what wiffle ball was) but we didn’t have a ball. So yep, you guessed it, we used the biscuits! It was hilarious…My brother stood in the living room and I stood in the end bedroom and the only thing that separated us was a long hallway. I was the pitcher and my brother and his friend took turns batting at mom’s biscuits. Them things bounced off the hallway walls and we rolled laughing each time they hit, even Momma was busting a gut at hard them biscuits was. LOL
Funny thing is that Momma remarried when I was 15 and the guy she married was very good cook. He taught Momma that there were more settings on the stove other than “high” and eventually she became a very good cook. She is now the food production manager at a fancy private college here in KY…still makes my head spin to think about how much things have changed since I was a child. 😉
Sorry to be so long winded but I just love to share the wiffle ball story with others, hope you enjoyed it.
Cindy Lou
mama made these too, but she fried it on top of the stove. she called it a FLITTER. don’t know where that came from, but she quilted for the public & worked it like a regular job. got up every morning early, fixed her a flitter & egg, coffee, & went to work, taking only a small lunch break & right back at it til wheel of fortune time, then a break & supper! yes, i agree, that you are smart beyond your years & seem to know what is ‘important’ far earlier in life than most!
This post makes me cry. I lost my dear Mama last year and my world has never been the same. She was THE best southern cook! I can remember standing in a chair next to the stove learning how to cook scrambled eggs and so many days of helping with supper. Back then I didn’t appreciate the kitchen chores that I now cherish as memories. When I moved out [and away] I could hardly afford my phone bills from calling Mama to ask how to cook something or just for reassurance that I’d done it right. Sadly, the one thing I never mastered were her biscuits. I love and miss you Mama.
Gale, i don’t know how many years it took me to quit dialing mama’s number just from habit. it’s been 24 years and i miss her everyday. On a lighter note, my youngest just got married, I was expecting her when Mama passed. She facebooked me a picture of a pot roast to be sure it wasn’t freezer burned. Mama would have laughed over that too.
How funny. FB’ing a frozen roast. Thanks for the laugh. The hard thing is when I think of something or see a good recipe not to react with “gotta call Mama…” I have a son, now serving in Afghanistan, and he tickled me the first year he moved out. He would call me and want me to be on the phone as he grocery shopped. He is creative, I’ll give him that.
These biscuits were on the table at about every meal. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, so we always had fresh fruits/veggies, thanks to my momma who worked very hard picking & canning to make sure of this. My mother worked in DesMoines, came home Fri. nite, got up at sometimes 4/4:30 am Sat. to go to the garden, the berry patches, & start her canning. She would leave again late Sun evening. momma never measured anything. funny how our momma’s always knew “just” the right amounts, huh??? LOL…My mother was a beautiful Christian lady, who worked also very hard to instill in my sister & I morals, intigrity, & self discipline..she has gone on to be with the Lord, but, I was one very lucky lil’ girl to have been dealt the momma I was..She also used to add fruit to the batter..this was our dessert…
Yes, ma’am, this is how my mama makes biscuits! It’s kind of a joke in our family – my sisters say that Mother fixes homemade biscuits like these pretty much only when my family is in town (we live in Texas while everyone else lives in Mississippi) and only because my New York husband needs them! (He does! And he LOVES her cooking! Bless his heart, he was deprived growing up, and Mother is just doing her part to help)
Otherwise, she makes “Wop” biscuits. Those are the ones in cans that you “wop” on the counter to open.
She is a wonderful cook – and a wonderful Mom/Mamaw/sister/neighbor (she feeds them, too!) and everything else. We are blessed girls to have her as a Mother and our example to follow.
we call ’em whopem biscuits !
I love your site, it has given me many a laugh and quite a fvew tears from laughing so hard. My mama used to use a big bowl with flour in it, she never washed it, just used it over and over again. Her biscuits were my dad’s favorite (he made his “poor man’s desert with them which consisted of her biscuits, coffee and sugar). He passed away 9 years ago and she hasn’t made her biscuits since. I just cannot get used to frozen or canned biscuits. The few times I have tried to make homemade biscuits, you could have used them for rocks or they bounced like a ball. I had given up ever making biscuits that were edible, but will try your recipe and see how it goes. Thanks again and keep up the good work.
My mom and I were separated before I was 2 years old…but we reunited when I was 10…I never lived with her for more than a week at a time, but I will always remember her cooking. When I think of her I have to think of the kitchen because that was where she seemed to spend her time. She made the best fried pork chops with smothered potatoes and onions…and she could take turkey legs, bake them with some onion and God knows what else, and make them fit for royalty! And I hated turkey legs!!! LOL When my mom laughed it seemed like laughter would break out all over the room….some say I look a lot like her, and I guess I see some resemblance, but there will never be anyone to take her place. Thank you for making me stop, reflect, and enjoy some memories that brought a smile to my face today!