Recipe Thursday - Almost Perfect Skillet Biscuits

One of the nuances of living the way we do is not always having the conveniences most people have. For instance if I want to bake anything it is a bit of work. I can't simply turn on the oven and expect it to be the perfect temperature in 10 to 15 minutes. Usually it takes at least 1/2 an hour to obtain the temperature needed for baking, and, as the stove is also our heater, there are times I really don't want to heat the house up if it is already a toasty 27 degrees Celsius (80 F).

For the last few years I have been trying very hard to perfect a biscuit that can be pan fried and while I have had some success I was never quite happy with the results. I tried recipe after recipe found on the internet and attempted to modify them to suit our tastes... nothing was quite right... Until now that is!

The answer was right in front of me all I had to do was change the ingredients slightly and this change happened quite by accident. Well, maybe accident isn't the right word for it. If I had been better prepared or organized we would have had bread already baked but here I was making dinner and I had no bread to put on the table. Did we really need it? No, but I really wanted some! So, what to do? Not enough time to heat the oven up. Biscuits, or Roti where my only quick choices. Biscuits it would be, but then in my haste I couldn't find my latest Bannock style recipe I had been working at perfecting. So, I just winged it. Sometimes (certainly not always!) I am amazed at the results.

I think anyone who bakes regularly has recipes floating around in their heads (I can't be the only weird one out there) so I started throwing stuff together. It turned out to be easier than I could have imagined.

Almost Perfect Skillet Biscuits

1 cup whole wheat four
1 cup white flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
7/8 cup of cold milk
4 tablespoons olive oil

Gather the ingredients then place a heavy skillet (I always use cast iron) on medium heat with a bit of butter in it. I takes a while for my skillets to heat; probably about 5 minutes which is all this took me to make these once I had the ingredients together.

Put flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl and mix together. Measure out milk to just a tiny bit below the one cup mark. Add olive oil. Mix together and pour into flour mixture. Mix with a fork until all is moistened.

Now you can use your hands. The dough will be so soft you will be thinking... this should be sticking to my hands! But it won't. It is perfect and very easy to mold. Form into eight balls and flatten.

Fry in heated skillet approximately 10 minutes.

I use another skillet to cover them while they are "baking".

 Then flip over carefully and fry another 5 to 7 min. 

The bottoms should be nice and brown but not burnt and the center should be perfectly done. They do lose some of their height when you flip them but that is the only downside to skillet biscuits. Well... maybe that and the calories but we won't think about that one, right??

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