Sourdough Stories Chapter 6 - Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

This week we were headed out on a Spring Break trip to Colorado in the wee hours of Saturday morning, which meant no time for bread-making this weekend. It also meant I needed to make sure I fed Mandough before we left.  

Since I work from home on Fridays, I decided to wake up early and make some quick biscuits using the discard from my sourdough feeding session.  This was somewhat a choice of necessity, since we've been in fridge cleanout mode all week, which means no milk, eggs....or really anything else in the fridge, aside from condiments & pickles.  We are THOROUGH.

But I have my handy can of instant buttermilk powder in the fridge, and we had some "butter".  I put that in quotations because what I actually had was Country Crock.  We have been out of real butter for a while (basically since it went over $4/pound).  This was not ideal, but it's morning, we need food, so we, in the words of Tim Gunn, MAKE IT WORK.

While I love the beautiful layers of a rolled out & cut biscuit...I am lazy.  And we were leaving on vaycay next next morning and I don't want to dirty any more of my kitchen than I have to.  And this recipe promised a sneaky trick to arrive at those beautiful butter clumps without having to freeze and grate butter (like the recipe for cut biscuits was asking me to do at 6am before having my coffee. Nope.)

So, I made some instant buttermilk (added a few ice cubes to get it super cold), and then melted my "butter", and mixed them together in the Kitchenaid, hoping for some magic....but...not surprisingly, melted Country Crock does not react the same way that melted butter would when mixed in with ice cold buttermilk.  Le sigh.  

BUT NO WORRIES!  I'm sure they'll still taste fine. So I mixed in the rest of the ingredients, popped them in the oven...

...and then 17 minutes later, we had some beautifully golden biscuits!  The were definitely a smoother texture than when I use real butter, and lacking in that beautifully buttery flavor that real butter adds, but honestly, still very good.  When split with some extra "butter" and cherry preserves, they were a perfect complement to the rest of our brek-FEAST (comprised of the other things we needed to polish off from the fridge.)

These would be perfect for biscuits & sausage gravy (or as I prefer to call it, "Flour Two Ways").

Our trip was a lovely success; it was Lil' Man's second time skiing and he's definitely a natural.  He gets his bravery & desire to go fast from his dad...and his propensity for falling at the top of the lift from me. :)