Biscuits: or, Kimbell Flour Redeemed

The Kimbell Flour people redeemed themselves just in time for Thanksgiving.

Biscuits 2 cups flour 3 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt ¼ cup shortening (I used half butter) ½ to ⅞ cup milk Heat oven to 475°. That is not a mistype. Four hundred seventy-five degrees, also known as gas mark 9, or 225°C. Sift dry ingredients together into a large bowl. Coarsely cut in shortening. Stir in enough milk to make a dough that is soft, but still firm enough to work with your hands. Turn out on floured board and knead lightly for about 30 seconds, or until smooth. Roll out to ½ inch thickness. Cut with biscuit cutter. Place in shallow, ungreased baking pan. (If you're worried about them sticking, line the pan with aluminum foil. Because of the high baking temperature, use foil instead of paper.) Bake until golden on top, about 10-12 minutes. Source: Kimbell Flour canister, probably 1940s-1950s

For those who are just dropping in, I've been making the recipes on this antique flour canister that lives among Mom's knickknacks. 

There are a lot of flour sacks with recipes on the side, but the Kimbell Flour Company's owners used all that carbohydrate-based money to fund one of the most prestigious art museums in the area. I wanted to try some of the recipes that led to people in North Texas to see Renaissance art for free. (The museum only charges for touring exhibits.)

Unfortunately, the recipes we've tried so far have been surprisingly bad. Their marble cake recipe fundamentally didn't work, and their banana bread was passable but bland. I couldn't believe a flour company would have such lousy canister recipes. And so, I tried another one just to see if they could get anything right.

I had high hopes for this recipe because it made the cover photo.

I was going to make the yeast-raised dinner rolls printed on the same canister, but I didn't think of it until the last minute. No one wants the bread to be ready five hours after the dinner dishes are washed and put away.  

The Kimbell people's biscuit recipe looked a lot like the one I've been making all this time. It calls for shortening, but I substituted half butter. A lot of older recipes use "shortening" to mean "any solid fat." 

At first I didn't believe the oven temperature. We haven't gotten the oven this hot since the pita bread. Just for sanity's sake, I cross-checked the some other biscuit recipes.  The Kimbell people set the oven dial a little higher than most others, but not by very much. If it wasn't Thanksgiving, I wouldn't have considered running the oven to nearly 500 degrees unless it was cold enough to ice out the roads. But I figured we're allowed a little bit of extravagance for the holidays.

Now, after countless biscuits that never rose, I have learned not to roll them out too thin. You don't want them to crisp up before the baking powder has a chance. But these might have benefited from a little more time with a rolling pin. They expanded into little towers of carbs. Then some of them tipped over.

I wasn't expecting these to be so good. They made up for the waste of eggs that was Kimbell's marble cake. I've made a lot of biscuits that were decent ish, but these were fantastic. The butter on top was almost superfluous, they were so good. It's hard to justify running the oven that hot unless we really mean it, but I am definitely looking for the next excuse to get away with baking these again.