biscuit - or biscuit crust - recipe Ok, Koukouvagia, I can give you the biscuit recipe.
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/4 or a little more cold butter sliced in small pieces (but cold)
2/3 cup buttermilk or yoghurt
If you're not comfortable yet with baking and rubbing butter into pastry dough, you might want to cool all the dry ingredients and bowl first, but i don;t imagine you'll have much trouble. The principle to keep in mind is not to melt the butter.
Put dry ingredients and butter in a bowl
By hand: rub with fingertips (not with whole hand, not to warm the butter) so that the butteris broken down and coated with flour, and the mixture resembles oatmeal. By machine: Mix it on low till the butter and flour are crumbly and like oatmeal. Don't mix too long or it will melt the butter. The principle is to get small pieces of cold butter surrounded by flour, so that in baking the butter will melt and leave little flakey layers. Do the next step by hand: add the buttermilk or yoghurt, and sort of toss it, so it all gets wet. Knead very lightly in the bowl, just to make it like a dough, not to develop gluten. It should look soft and homogeneous. You might need more or less liquid or flour. It should hold together.
Roll or pat out on a floured surface so it's about a finger thick and lift on top of the pie pan.
brush with milk, make some cute slits, and that's it.
Bake about 450 for biscuits, but I'd say also for the pie. Your filling is cooked and hot anyway.
It's pretty hard to go wrong here, i've made it without even measuring, just by eye. A very forgiving recipe.
If you have leftovers, you can bake on a baking sheet with the pie, and eat them separately. Yes, you can put more butter on them, and they are really nice. Just watch them because they'll cook faster.
Cooks illustrated has an even easier recipe that comes out ok, made with cream and no butter. It's more foolproof, you can probably find it online.
This one I gave you is from (dare i say it) the old betty crocker cookbook from the 1950s. A great source for american traditional dishes and truly foolproof cakes. (It's got a great tomato soup recipe that makes you realize what campbells was trying to do). Oh, and it, too, suggests biscuit crust for chicken pie - as well as pie crust, "if you prefer" |