I take my biscuits round and my sorghum dark
I’ve recently fallen prey to a shaming on social media, and I have had to get myself back in touch with my roots. My biscuit roots, that is. Apparently, the latest trend in baked goods is making biscuits square instead of the time-honored round shape with which we all grew up. Yep, you read that correctly, square.
I belong to several food groups on Facebook and one in particular is managed by a gifted baker who has really made a name for herself with her square biscuits. Thanks to her and numerous other crazy people out there, this foreign method is gaining traction, to the point that I started to worry that I was missing out.
I make really good biscuits, if I do say so myself, because my momma made really good biscuits, because her momma before her made really good biscuits. I have tweaked my process over the years, but my biscuit recipe is tried and true, of this I am certain.
I was taught to press out the dough and cut out rounds, but my aunt made the cathead-style biscuits that are formed one at a time with a little bit of buttermilk poured into a well in a mound of Crisco-laden flour. Either way, the biscuits were made round, though they sometimes developed a few angles from growing together in the pan.
Until I started seeing these towering square concoctions online referred to as biscuits, I had never questioned our methods. I saw people raving about how wonderful these newfangled concoctions were and I couldn’t help but wonder, what had I and my mother, and my grandmother, and my aunt, missed out on?
I decided to try it and found it to be entirely frustrating to make biscuits in this recommended shape. I did a little research to see if I’d done something wrong and, according to a young whippersnapper writer for Bon Appétit magazine, we’ll never find round biscuits in her kitchen again.
To each their own, is all I have to say to that. The arguments are compelling, but I’m simply not convinced.
What I find most debatable in her perspective is her assertion that square makes for better biscuit sandwiching. Unless someone starts growing square tomatoes, or raising chickens that make square-yolked eggs, or Jimmy Dean starts selling sausage in square logs, you’re simply not going to convince me on this point.
I recently had the opportunity to serve as a judge in a sweet sorghum syrup competition put on by the National Sweet Sorghum Producers and Processors Association. I was nervous, I couldn’t imagine there being much difference in the various syrups because I have only known it to be a certain way for all of my life.
Our current family favorite producer, and the person who asked me to participate, is Steve Patterson who, along with his family, makes his syrup right here in Rome, Ga. My father buys a case of 12 quarts each year, and we all look forward to seeing how each year’s batch turns out.
I know that where and how the sorghum cane is grown can affect the character of the syrup, along with the weather and how it is harvested and processed, but I was so surprised at the variety of styles that we found in the 42 syrups that we sampled in the competition!
Most shocking for my sensibilities was that there is a trend towards lighter colored syrup that has a completely different flavor from the dark and edgy syrup I have always known. The twang is important, but it turns out that it isn’t dependent on the depth of cooking.
The contest chair, Austin Kramer, drove from his 7th-generation family sorghum syrup operation in Iowa to be with us, and he explained that the only requirement to being called sweet sorghum syrup is registering a Brix reading of 74. Everything else is open to interpretation, and I was so surprised at how much interpretation there was.
A lot of people confuse sorghum syrup with molasses, which is a byproduct of the processing of sugar cane into white and brown sugars. Sorghum cane is a different plant that was introduced in the United States from Africa in the mid-1800s.
The hope was that sorghum sugar could replace the imported and slave-dependent sugars from sugar cane, but the crystallization didn’t work. The use of sorghum syrup persisted, however, and became an important product in many communities.
You can’t help but learn a lot of nuance when you taste 42 different varieties of something, and the regions and traditions really began to show as we ate our way through them.
There may be a few different shapes and styles of biscuits, but the variation in sorghum syrup is as broad as the geography that produces it.
The first place syrup was decidedly lighter in color and brighter in flavor than I was accustomed to, but I look forward to learning to appreciate this different style. For now, though, I will stick with the syrup of my people, a darker and richer variety of which I cannot get enough.
And I’ll take that syrup on a round biscuit, thank you very much, because that is simply what feels right. Now pass the butter, please.