Uncooked Seed Encrusted Amaranth Biscuits from Heidi Swanson’s ‘Super Natural Cooking’, a totally fantastic cookbook. This made about 35 1.5 inch biscuits.
I *love* homemade, fresh from the oven biscuits. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, with tea or an afternoon snack, freshly baked biscuits go with so many things.
A typical biscuit recipe makes between 16 and 24 biscuits, which, unless I want to eat biscuits for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next four days, is simply too many for me to consume. Invariably, half of the biscuits end up getting stale and going to waste, and at the same time I’ll have eaten so many that I get burnt out on biscuits! At first, I would make a half or even a quarter recipe, but found that this was a lot of work for just a few biscuits. What a quandary: making a full recipe produces way too many, but it’s not worth the effort to make just three or four biscuits from scratch.
So, my solution is to make a full batch, bake a few, and simply freeze the extra uncooked biscuits. To freeze biscuits:
1. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, wax paper, or aluminum foil. Place uncooked biscuits on the baking sheet, taking care that none of the biscuits are touching. You only need to leave 1/4 inch or so between the biscuits since the uncooked dough will keep its exact shape when frozen (unlike baking where the biscuits expand — I know, this seems obvious, but you might notice when you’re placing the biscuits on the baking sheet that your instinct is to space them as for baking).
2. Freeze the sheet of biscuits until the biscuits are frozen solid* (see note below) — at least 5-6 hour, or overnight. Remove biscuits from the tray and place in a freezer safe plastic bag. Since the biscuits are frozen solid, you won’t have a problem of them all freezing into one big dough heap.
3. When you want to cook the biscuits, remove as many as desired from the bag and place them still frozen onto a baking sheet. Cook as you would normal (unfrozen) biscuits, but adding about 8-10 (or longer for large biscuits) since the dough with thaw in the oven.
Fifteen 1 1/2 inch biscuits about to go into the freezer
This way you can have fresh baked biscuits whenever you want, and you need only bake as many or as few as you’d like. Problem solved!
*Note: Freezing the biscuits until solid is very important! The first time I tried freezing biscuits, I simply put all the uncooked biscuits into a ziploc bag and threw it in the freezer. Big mistake. I ended up with a big frozen dough ball, and to get individual biscuits, I had to partially thaw the dough ball, which would then get thrown back into the freezer to re-freeze. The thaw-freeze-thaw-freeze cycle left me with dried out, only slightly better than mediocre biscuits.
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