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.
First, I’d like to say these were the perfect compliment to the apple butter! And, so quick & easy! I am sure these will be made in my home time & again! I also liked the suggestion for tossing in shredded cheese & herbs. The biscuits are basic enough that I’m sure there are lots of variations one could come up with.
I say “one” not “that I could come up with” because I’m one who won’t make a recipe unless I have EXACTLY what the recipe calls for! I’m not brave enough to try my own substitutions! LOL. BUT!! I have come a long way… When I was first married 5 years ago, I could make grilled cheese & hamburger helper! Now I’ve been making quite a few meals from scratch (following recipes exactly, however! hehe).
I say all that just to get to “my mama” – I love her dearly but a good cook, she is not! ;). She had a knack for making spaghetti taste like it was boiled in water from a rusty pipe – a sort of aluminum aftertaste! LOL. So, I did not learn any great culinary skills growing up! However, she was amazing with a sewing machine! She would make make my clothes and then even use the scraps to make matching outfits for my Barbie dolls! I’m 31 now and just had my own baby girl so while I’m still trying to learn the art of cooking (& am thankful to Christy for helping with that!), I’ve also been inspired by my mother to learn how to make clothes for my baby girl 😉
My mother has five of us kids, and she’d make a pan of biscuits and a pan of gravy every morning for us to eat for breakfast before we left for school. We’d have a variety of gravy (tomato is my favorite)- that would change depending on what was on hand – but always homemade biscuits! Sometimes, we’d just dunk our biscuits in coffee! That is so much better than it sounds! Kathy
Hi again Christy. Thank you again for this website. I have sent you a couple of emails but I haven’t heard back from you. They would show as being from L & B Smith. I also subscribed to your newsletter Friday night but haven’t received a newsletter. Have you sent any out since then? I tried to subscribe again but it says something like I am already subscribed. Anyhoo, I hope you get my emails.
My best food memory of my mama is her slow-cooked ham and I just read your recipe for that. I am so leery of cooking with aluminum anymore because of the link to alzheimer’s and gulf war syndrome. I am also afraid of the plastic cooking bags because of all the news lately about plastic. But maybe that is just microwaving plastic? I am going to get a stainless steel roasting pan with lid to try to make the ham like mama did, using your recipe – minus the aluminum foil. I will let you know how it turns out. Hers would just fall apart and it was so moist. It was so not good manners but whenever she’d take it out of the oven and it would cool down a bit, we’d just pull it apart with forks, standing at the stove. It eventually looked like a dog or two got ahold of it. *blushes profusely*
I have too many food memories of my grandmothers to even try to write about. Those women lived in a teeny tiny little town in middle Georgia and used such different ingredients. One never ever cooked with tomatoes or cabbage and the other did frequently. One hardly ever made cakes or pies and the other did frequently. Both lived on farms with cows, pigs, and lots of vegetables. One churned her own butter and the other didn’t. But we dined like southern royalty every Sunday, no matter which dining room table we were seated at. I always fretted about it when I spent the night with one of them and they let me sleep until I woke up on my own. By that time, there were already a couple of cakes or pies that were done, or dinner (the noon-time meal) well on its way to being done. Now that I am a mom, I understand why they let me sleep, preparing such a big meal like that. 🙂
I have a couple of really special recipes I would love to share with you, if we can just get our Es together. 🙂
You are a joy, I can tell! What a blessing you must be to those who are in your everyday life.
Thank you.
Mama made biscuits everyday for years. She would add everything together including the milk and work it all together with her hands. Mama fixed enough in the mornings for all three meals, covered the pans for later and put them in the frigerator. I liked the biscuits that set in the frig all day the best. My daddy liked biscuits with his meals better than cornbread, of course, Mama would fix both.
We ate the biscuits instead of loaf bread (I called it Daddy’s work bread). Everyday when we got home from school, we would have a biscuit and jelly to tie us over until supper. For a special treat, when Mama had left over biscuits, she opened them up, put butter and sprinkled sugar over them and put in the oven to heat.
I’m gonna have to make these. Biscuits are a treat around here because my little one can’t have milk. I’ll bet I could do these with his soy milk, though.
I have many fond memories of growing up with my momma. My momma was a single mother for most of her life. Even when my stepdaddy came into the picture when I was 8 years old, he never had much to do with me. He’s only recently started really taking an interest in my life and I’m fairly certain that it’s because I have a five year old son (his only grandbaby, who he brags about constantly) and he’s realized what he’s missed in recent years.
My momma was an awesome cook. She’s had to slow down due to her arthritis. She made awesome homemade cinnamon rolls that make me drool just thinking about them. She also used to make homemade noodles for her chicken and noodle dumpling soup. Oh, my word. She is awesome. I have a few of my momma’s recipes and I use them often. Momma said I’m not allowed to have the rest of her “secrets” till she’s gone. She thinks that if she gives me her recipes now that I won’t need her anymore. No matter what your age, you always need your momma!
My husband doesn’t have a relationship with his mom. She basically threw him to the curb when he was 11 years old and she’s never looked back. It’s sad, but I guess that’s the way life goes sometimes.
You absolutely MUST get the book “Junie B. Jones is a Party Animal” by Barbara Park and read it with your daughter. It’s all about how everything is better at your own grandma’s house. My daughter (now a teenager) loved it and we mailed it to her grandma after we read it. Grandma and Granddaddy both loved it too.
The one thing I think of, when speaking of my mom cooking, is peach cobbler. What most people call peach cobbler, I would call a deep dish pie. My mom’s cobbler was made more like a VERY moist cake with peach slices scattered throughout the cake. She made it in a blue bowl. I’m not sure what that bowl was made out of. I’ve never seen another one like it. But alas, the old blue bowl is still around, but with a crack in it now. My mom is still around too. She was 91 last January. Unfortunately she is cracked too. She fell and broke her neck. I told her that at her age, people fell and broke their hip, NOT their neck. She said she thought people always died when they broke their neck. But she is still going! And I swear by my mama’s peach cobbler. The best there is. If only she could remember her recipe.