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.
My daddy was a carpenter and had to leave for work very early every morning. Momma made a full breakfast of bacon and eggs and hot biscuits every single morning for us, but mainly for Daddy, knowing he’d need it. I have two funny and sweet memories tied to her delicious breakfasts. One, is that Daddy always took the whole plate of biscuits, every morning, and one by one, buttered them and transferred them to HIS plate (just swapping plates). We often had visiting preachers come and spend the night with us. One time, Daddy was buttering the biscuits as usual, and the elderly preacher said, “Sister Dorothy, would you pass me those biscuits before Brother Rex eats every one of them?” The other funny memory for me, is that I always thought that the TOAST that my friends had for breakfast was something exotic. I didn’t eat toast until I was 10 or 12 years old! 🙂
Patti, it just made my heart smile hearing your breakfast memories. Those were the days!!!
I was raised by Southern grandparents in the Pacific Northwest. Change of region did not change my Granny’s way of cookin’ or talkin’. Cat heads were often served for breakfast because they were quicker, and when a school mate would ask what I had for breakfast, I would get some strange looks when I said “Cat heads ‘n’ gravy.” lol
Granny would sometimes fry her dropped dough in bacon grease in a hot cast iron skillet, and I loved it. She called it “camp bread”, from back in the days of the depression when they couldn’t afford to rent a house and lived in a big army tent in the cedar brakes where Grandpa earned a meager living. She cooked over an open fire, so biscuit dough (“camp bread”) and cornbread batter (“hoe cakes”) were fried, not baked. The didn’t have a real house back then, but they had food on the table when many others did not.
Granny has been gone for 30 years now, & I miss her every day, but she taught me to cook at an early age, so I can still enjoy cat heads & gravy, camp bread, and hoe cakes…Never as good as her’s, of course, but pretty darned close. 🙂
Your comment about your baking sheet made me think about mine. I have two thin aluminum cookie sheets that I have had for years. If I lift the pan from only one end, the sheet will bend under the weight of my cookies. My sister-in-law noticed this at Christmas, and said she needed to buy me some new ones. I have some heavy duty baking sheets, but these old ones have served me well for over 40 years. I have baked many cookies and pizzas on these cookie sheets, never burning a one. I quickly shot down her offer.
Sometimes you just can’t beat tried and true!!
My mom… Is a working woman, with a husband and 2 kids.
She is a nurse at a clinic here in South Africa, but in the more rural area.
Most of her days are spent helping others, with health and personal problems, mostly they go hand in hand with a under staffed clinic, equipment not working (something basic like a toilet or aircon, in our area it gets about 45 degrees Celcius on a normal summer day).
Despite all these challenges that her work has on a daily basis. She has never taken part in a protest, stayed away from work even if she is sick, that woman needs to be one foot in the grave before she’ll stay away from work.
I even remember that she once wrote a letter to her boss telling him despite being so tired and not wanting to go into work, she thinks about the people who need her. The system in our country has already failed them, she can’t give up on them, because she doesn’t want to also be a dissapointment to them.
As I sit here with tears in my eyes writing this, I can only say that my mom has a beautiful heart and pure soul. A woman who works a fulltime job, but never has she missed a piano show or netball match, she helps my dad on both farms and even now with me living in an other city she always comes trough when I need her.
I aspire to be a mother and woman like her.
Strong, kind, independent and caring.
I love you Mamma.
Oh my goodness, what a wonderful woman!! You were blessed with a good Mama!!
After reading these comments about mamas, I knew I had to add one about mine.
I grew up in the 60s-70s and remember my mother making biscuits almost every day. She had the “recipe” memorized, of course, never measuring a thing. She mixed the wet ingredients in the center of a flour-covered dinner plate, then folded that edge of flour up and onto the wet dough, gently working it in. She knew by feel when it was “ready” and would pinch off biscuits of the same size, lightly packing them into her already-greased black skillet. We’d eat these with bacon and eggs or with sausage gravy…and we NEVER realized how lucky were were at the time! Fast forward a few years. My mom stopped making biscuits! We’d see them once a year, at Christmas. I guess frozen biscuits even got to my mama! Happens to the best of us…..sigh.
My mother made biscuit very often–the dough was always rolled out and the biscuit cut into perfect rounds. They were always super delicious. I tried many times to make mine like hers to no avail. Since we had 4 children and time was very precious, I resorted to making the drop biscuits which were quicker and just as good, if not better. The children all liked them just as much and since they were larger it took fewer biscuit. ( the oldest son could eat as many as 13 of my mother’s biscuit.) I still make the drop biscuit as most of my children do and my husband makes them also. I use my mother’s recipe with buttermilk and use a little more milk. They are the best with saw-mill gravy.
What precious memories!!
My mama is the glue that holds our family together! This year, for the first time EVER, she LET me cook all the sides for Thanksgiving ~ but, only because I told her she wasn’t allowed to do them since it was her birthday on Thanksgiving day this year!!! Honestly, you can’t tell my mama’s cooking from mine either, for the most part. She taught me how to cook and bake and I paid great attention! Nothing better than a hug from my mama STILL. I feel truly, truly blessed to still have my mama with me, too! Nothing better. There are still a few things my mama makes that I have yet to master ~ her fluffy biscuits, homemade gravy, potato candy and pulled pork bbq. Very close, but NO competition, for sure!! <3