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.
Christy is right about missing the person, and no one can cook like mama.
Got to have Sawmill Gravy on the biscuits, though.
My mother was a very good cook but my Grand Mother did the baking. When I was too young to see the top of the drain board she “Mama” would put me in a kitchen chair so I could kneed her bread. She made 5 loves a week all the way through the WW2 as she had since she got married in the early 1900’s or late 1890’s Then she said she was going to try some “store bread” after that home made bread was a special treat. But where she really shown was with her biscuits, pies, fried pies and cakes etc. To make biscuits she would put a pint (in a glass bottle with a paper seal) of pasteurized milk out to sour very early in the morning. This was my first hint we were going to have biscuits. She had a flour bin that held 25lbs of flour and a wooden bowl that she held in her apron. She would open the flour bin and just scrape flour into the bowl, get out the lard and cut off a piece cut it into the flour then make a well pour in some sour milk and work it in adjusting the milk till it suited her. Then roll out the dough and with her “biscuit” glass cut out the biscuits and bake. These were about 1″ thick and 4″ around. I have never been able to duplicate her biscuits. I think the loss of the butter fat in the pasteurized milk has a lot to do with it. That and her loving touch. Being male I have always felt blessed to have received some of her knowledge and love of cooking. I now have some trouble with the prep but I will continue to cook as long as I can in honor of my grand mother and mother. Had an Aunt Bell that showed me some about canning but that is a whole other story.
What beautiful posts from all the readers! Motherhood is love in action and we never forget the gifts of love our mothers have given us, each in her own special way. My mother showed a great deal of her love for her family in her cooking–and she produced the most delicious food I have EVER tasted. I can never reproduce her cooking efforts satisfactorily, although my own family doesn’t complain (too much!). I miss my Mama (we never outgrow the need for our mamas) and pray that she knows what a legacy of love she has left.
My mama died when I was 5 so I never had a chance to get to really know her. I was the youngest of 4 boys and we were very poor. My MaMa Brown (my Dad’s Mom) came to live with us and was a wonderful cook. She made my PJ’s out of bleached flour sacks. My fondest memory was watching her wring a Chicken’s neck, and watching her fry that same chicken for supper. I remember her to tell me to sit under the kitchen table cause I was underfoot while she cooked. I was the only one of 4 boys allowed in the kitchen while she cooked. I loved her so much – she died in 1963.
My mother and grandmother always cut out their biscuits. Used the little juice glasses you got with Bama Jelly. (My granddaddy worked for Bama and I never drank out of a glass that wasn’t a jelly jar until I was grown.). Anyway, I first had drop biscuits when my Aunt Agnes came to stay with us after my mom passed away when I was 19. She got up every morning for those two weeks and made biscuits, bacon, eggs and grits for us before we either headed to work or school. A lot of my recipes are my Aunt Agnes’….no wonder they call me “Little Agnes”.
So many touching posts today…..I am fortunate to still have my Mama with me, and also fortunate that she is a good cook!
She has already written down many of the recipes she made for Daddy and me when I was growing up. The one thing she always fixed that I simply cannot master is steak and gravy!
My Mom made great biscuits and still does once in a while. She is now 79 years old. When the boy next door knew she was making biscuits for supper, he made it a point to “get invited”. That lasted until his mom found out and made him stop visiting at suppertime.Mom used to make popovers as well. They were crispy crunchy outside and hollow inside.We didn’t have them often because my dad always wanted her biscuits, but when she did make them, I was a happy person. Doesn’t food hold so many warm memories?