Tom Douglas

Nancy Oakes Makes Biscuits by Shelley Lance, Blog Editor

Our final day of Summer Camp featured this Dynamic Duo: Nancy Oakes, chef-owner of San Francisco’s marvelous restaurant, Boulevard, and Bruce Aidells, celebrity chef, cookbook writer, and master of all things meat.  They each did their own cooking demos, but worked as a (somewhat feisty and delightfully argumentative) team through both demos.  Nancy demo’d Hawaiian hearts of palm carbonara and Southern fried buttermilk game hens with cream biscuits and slaw.

Over the course of a couple decades of restaurant work, I have made big batches of biscuits many times, and I’m pretty good at it.  I especially like cream biscuits, and my go-to recipe has always been the James Beard version from Beard on Bread. However, Nancy made the best, fluffiest, lightest, high-rise biscuits ever, and I learned at least 2 things from her technique:

1. Nancy uses self-rising flour (which is flour that has baking flour and salt already added).  I never understood the need for buying this product, but now that I’ve tasted Nancy’s biscuits I’m a convert.

2. When Nancy was adding the cream to the dry ingredients, she said: “See how the dough looks a little bit too dry, with just a couple of dry pieces flaking off the outside of the ball of dough.  This is where you think you want to add more cream, but this is where you should stop.” She then proceeded to pat the dough into a nice thick square. She cut the dough into square biscuits and dipped each biscuit’s top in melted butter, then baked the biscuits in a hot oven.  As I said, this resulted in the lightest, flakiest, and best biscuits ever.  I know that if I had been making that batch of dough, I absolutely would have added a few more tablespoons of cream at the point she stopped.  So, from now on, I’m making biscuits Nancy’s way. Here’s her recipe:

Nancy Oakes’ Cream Biscuits

1  1/2 cups self rising flour

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1 cup heavy cream, plus a few tablespoons more if necessary

1/3 cup melted butter

Preheat the oven to 425°F.  Put the self-rising flour, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl.  Using a fork, slowly stir in the cream until the dough just begins to come together.  If it feels dry and there are too many pieces falling away, add a little more cream, one tablespoon at a time.  Once the dough comes together, turn it out onto a lightly floured cutting board and pat and shape it with your hands into a 1/2 inch thick square.  Cut into 9 squares and dip each square into the melted butter.   Place the biscuits on a baking sheet.  Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes or until lightly golden.  Serve hot from the oven.

Nancy’s tip for making sweet biscuits for fruit filled shortcake: simply sprinkle the tops of the biscuits generously with sugar after dipping them in butter.  Bake, split, and fill with sugared fruit.

July 22nd, 2009