My mother requested biscuits with sausage gravy yesterday for dinner. I was happy to comply. A couple of weeks ago I bought a pound of sausage at the Wenatchee Valley Farmers Market and was eager to try it. Sausage and biscuits is one of those quick and easy dinners (or breakfasts) that I enjoy making. Fortunately for me, we also had just enough cream on hand that needed to be used up.

When I was a kid, I would occasionally help my grandmother make biscuits, cutting them out with the lip of a water glass. I loved cutting out the rounds. When I left home and made biscuits for the first time by myself, I was quite disappointed. The biscuits were hard and flavorless, less like biscuits than lumps of cooked flour.

Since then, I’ve had best luck using a cream biscuit recipe and hardly mixing the dough. Pie dough is similar; too much mixing and too much liquid will ruin it.

Yesterday, I used this recipe for biscuits from epicurious.com, which originally appeared in 1999 in Gourmet magazine. It’s very simple, quick and worked really well. The recipe says it yields six biscuits, but I made eight smaller biscuits from it.

Recipe

Biscuits

From Gourmet 1999 and epicurious.com

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter
3/4 cup heavy cream

Preheat oven to 425°F. and lightly grease a baking sheet.

Into a large bowl sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Cut 5 tablespoons butter into bits and with your fingertips or a pastry blender blend into flour mixture until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add cream, stirring with a fork until just combined. Transfer mixture to a lightly floured surface and gently knead about 3 times until it just forms a dough. Pat dough into a 6 1/2-inch round (about 1/2 inch thick).

Using a 2 1/2-inch round cutter cut out biscuits and arrange about 1 inch apart on baking sheet. Gather and pat out scraps and cut out more biscuits.

Melt remaining tablespoon butter and lightly brush onto biscuits. Bake biscuits in middle of oven until pale golden and cooked through, about 20 minutes.