SC - biscuits oop

[Philip & Susan Troy]

allilyn at juno.com wrote:
> 
> >> I also, sometimes, omit the baking
> powder in my biscuits, and instead beat the dough with a leather mallet
> for
> about 30 minutes<<
> 
> Never have heard of this.  Do you lay the dough on a flat surface and
> beat it as you do a round steak?  Can't comprehend how this would make
> the biscuits rise.  Do you know the chemistry of it?  This is the secret
> of 'beaten biscuit', perhaps?  I've lived in the South a lot but never
> saw them made by a Southerner or was too young to remember.  Do you also
> knead, or does this do all the work once the ingredients are stirred in?
> Could be one of the period techniques they didn't explain and we don't
> know today.

One reason they may not be immediately associated by everybody with the
South is that AFAIK, they're a phenomenon of the Middle Atlantic states,
trademark of places like Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania (you know,
The Scrapple Belt). I mean, just 'cause they're biscuits doesn't mean...
well, you know.

The chemistry (really the physics, I think) is as follows. Beating the
dough for a prolonged time accomplishes two things: it traps air inside
the dough and distributes it evenly, rendering it sort of spongy so that
"oven spring" can create the rise by a quick jolt of steam inside the
dough in the hot oven, and by overworking the gluten. The biscuits, as I
think Balthazar mentioned, don't get quite as dramatic a rise as
leavened biscuits do, but this is compensated for by extreme tenderness.
The beating is similar to kneading, except it also traps air in the
dough as mentioned above, but unlike leavened biscuits where the aim is
to work as little of the potential gluten as possible into the dough, to
avoid toughness, this dough is deliberately overworked to develop all
the gluten, then break it up again. Remember the Plat recipe for Prince
Bisket, which gets beaten for an hour and produces a fragile but not
especially hard "cookie"? This is a similar concept.

Most recipes I've seen call for beating with a mallet for 30 minutes,
but you can buy (or used to be able to buy) a commercially-made gizmo
whose only purpose is to "beat" biscuit dough. It resembles a laundry
mangle with ridged rollers, and there are recipes which call for rolling
the dough through this device a certain number of times for different
occasions: say, fifty times for everyday family use, 100 times for
guests, and 200 times for State Occasions. Note that these are made-up
numbers; offhand I don't remember the real ones. Similarly some recipes
give different beating times when you're using a mallet, but half an
hour seems to be the minimum. 

A rhythmic wrist action seems to be required. It occurs to me that your
average Maryland housewife of the nineteenth century could walk right
into the Crown Lists of Atlantia, and no questions asked.
    
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com