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Bobo Bonobo® Bobo Bonobo® is offline
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Default Shortening versus Butter in Homemade Biscuits

On Jul 26, 7:08*pm, Arri London > wrote:
> Christine Dabney wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:47:11 GMT, "brooklyn1"
> > > wrote:

>
> > >Butter works as a shortening in pastry and sweet doughs but not in
> > >breads

>
> > Broche has a lot of butter, and it is what gives it much of it's
> > character. * I think that is a bread.. *

>
> > Christine

>
> Plus people made bread with butter or lard long before solid veg
> shortenings were invented. They work perfectly for breads as well as
> sweetened doughs.
>
> We never have veg shortening in the house.


As it should be.

> The Maternal Unit likes the
> cheap tube biscuits which contain shortening plus too much baking
> powder. They have an aftertaste which isn't pleasant.


Is the mother aware of the unhealthiness of the tube biscuits? If so,
well, maybe she is old, and the tradeoff with atheroscelerosis is OK
to her. There are some neighbor children whose grandmother is dying
of lung cancer. My son is not allowed in their house because she
smokes in there. She continues to smoke. She already has terminal
cancer, so let her smoke. I do have a concern that her grandkids get
second hand smoke. It came out today that they haven't been getting
fed anywhere near often enough, so I backed away from my rule of
generally not feeding the neighborhood kids, and invited them to
dinner. It's not their fault that their mother can't take care of
them, and their grandmother now cannot either.
I served Q'd pork steaks, and corn, cut off the cob, and cooked with
just a little chopped tomato and one chopped jalapeno per six ears of
corn. If we have to informally take over the job of occasionally--or
maybe pretty often--giving them a meal, then I'm OK with that. My
wife fed them bowls of cereal this morning too. They aren't stray
dogs, they're children, and nice children at that. I wish that I had
allowed my son to experience a bit more hunger, but not what they're
going through. This is a case where charitibleness should trump my
priniciple of not becoming the soup kitchen for poorer neighbors'
kids, when the parents make choices to spend their money for things
other than feeding their kids. This family really is in crisis, and
the grandmother who is a very sweet but proud old woman, just can't
step up to the challenge.
>
> Damaeus...your overly yellow biscuits may have had too much baking
> powder in them. That often will turn a dough yellowish.


But too much baking powder would screw up texture even more. I think
that it's mostly the butter, but hey, yellow is good. To quote Homer
Simpson, "Mmmm. Rich, creamery butter."

--Bryan