Cake flour biscuits in the making.

Finished biscuits; pale but perfect.

My Daddy was a Southerner and his sister-in-law, my Aunt Gladys, made the best baking powder biscuits south of the Mason-Dixon line.

She had a peculiar method: She had one of those tip-out, zinc-lined, under-the-counter bins in her kitchen — you don't see them anymore but they were designed for flour or other bulk grains. It would be full of the soft wheat flour that are one key to great biscuits (we favor White Swan brand and I have a connection who gets some for me whenever she's in the South; I keep it in the freezer just for making biscuits).

She'd tip out the bin, make a well in the flour and, with her one large, skilled hand, mix the biscuits right in the bin. Finally, with a deft, twisting move, again with one hand, she would twist off meticulouslly even knobs of dough, pat them gently and deposit them on the baking pan. No rolling or cutting.

They would bake up airy light and golden and when she stopped baking in old age, we all went into mourning.

The other day, planning soup for lunch, I realized there was no good bread in the house and I really like a savory bread with soup. Biscuits, I thought. But mine have never been all that great, I thought. And I was out of White Swan. I recalled seeing recipes that used cake flour to lighten the biscuits (it's also a very soft wheat, low gluten, low-protein flour type). But I had two boxes of cake flour and was wanting to get rid of some of it before the bugs got busy.

Online I went (what did we do before online? I'd have been thumbing through cookbooks for hours). As it was, Google coughed up about a gazilion references to cake flour biscuits. But only one used all cake flour and this was what I wanted to try.

I found it on BakeSpace.com ("Come for the food. Stay for the conversation.") If you're into baking and haven't seen this site, which encourages chat and the sharing of advice as much as recipes, you need to go there.

A. J. Diliberti wrote quite a treatise on the mission to create the perfect cake flour biscuits. Soon I was in the kitchen and within half an hour or so, I had hot biscuits. Good ones. Not Aunt Gladys but light and delicious. Didn't even need butter.

Things to know if you try this: If you're a serious baker, you've got a kitchen scale but for those who use dry measures, I've given equivalents, though they're estimates. The dough is VERY soft but it is workable on a well-floured surface. Throughout the process, work lightly and quickly; don't overmix the dough, don't knead more than a few times, don't roll too hard. As with any product using baking powder, the leavening process begins very quickly and the sooner you get the biscuits shaped and in a pre-heated oven, the lighter they will be.

I came up with a cool way to deal with the shortening; she highly recommends leaf lard but I didn't have any, so I used Crisco. Measuring shortening has always seemed to me to be a messy chore, scooping and mashing into a measuring cup. Fishing through my utensil drawer, I came upon my old-fashioned ice cream scoop (the kind with the slide and lever action) and I used that. It worked perfectly for plopping the Crisco into the scale and it turned out one scoop was the perfect measure for this recipe.

You'll note in the picture that my biscuits are not golden brown but rather pale. This is because my oven tends to burn the bottoms of things before the tops get browned and I've learned the hard way that when the bottoms are golden and the tops feel right, I should pull the baked goods out. Better pale on top than charred on the bottom so long as the centers are cooked. (And, yes, I've used an oven thermometer to calibrate my oven; it is 25 degrees too hot and I compensate for that, but there's just something about the way it circulates heat, or maybe it's my ancient baking pans. Who knows?)

It's worth it to go to BakeSpace.com to read Diliberti's backgrounder.

A. J. Diliberti's Perfect Biscuits

280 grams Swans Down cake flour (about 2 1/8 cups)

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon kosher salt

70 grams lard or vegetable shortening (1 standard ice cream scoop or about 1/4 cup)

1 scant cup  milk (somewhere between 3/4 and 1 cup)

1 tablespoon butter melted

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Sift dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl. Add lard or shortening and cut int o flour pastry blender or your fingers. Add milk and stir just until mixed. Turn dough out onto a floured work surface and knead 7-10 times; use a pastry knife (frosting spreader) to fold the dough. With a floured rolling pin; roll out to 1/2-inch thick. Push a round cutter straight down into dough to form biscuits (flour the cutter between biscuits). Using the pastry knife and touching the biscuits as little as possible, move the biscuits to an ungreased baking sheet. Brush tops with melted butter and bake in 450-degree oven 8 to 10 minutes or until golden brown.

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