I loves me some biscuits. The flakiness, the butter melting into a freshly-baked split, the golden crust… Ahhhh. Problem is, I’ve always been a little afraid of baking them myself. First, they just seem too simple to be easy, if that makes sense. The technique is the thing when you’ve only got a few humble ingredients, and, well, biscuit technique is sorely lacking from my experience. Also, they sure do call for a lot of fat, don’t they? All that shortening makes them taste mighty fine, but it also means baking an entire recipe for just me and S to eat is a bad idea. After all, if they taste as good as I’d hope, we’d likely eat the whole thing!
But this morning I woke up extra-early for some reason and felt like giving it a shot. I had two bunches of chives: one onion, one garlic, and the idea of baking them up into sunny little towers of goodness was immensely appealing. I found a recipe from Cooking Light for a parsley variety, so with a minor substitution I was off and running.
The plan was to bake the biscuits and then cook up some eggs and facon, make this a real country breakfast (albeit one that’s still healthy). But once we tasted the biscuits plain, S and I couldn’t wait for the rest of it! We had five or six small biscuits each, with absolutely nothing on them, happily munching on the savory, oniony nuggets. They’re not quite as good as the full-fat kind—the crust is a tiny bit tough, and they’re less flaky—but mmm-mmm it hit the spot!
Low-Fat Chive & Pepper Biscuits
Makes 16 small biscuits
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons chilled butter or stick margarine, cut into small pieces
½ cup minced fresh chives [I used a combination of garlic chives & onion chives]
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/3 cup 1% low-fat milk
1/3 cup plain low-fat yogurt
Cooking spray
2 teaspoons 1% low-fat milk
Preheat oven to 400.
Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl; cut in butter with a pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture resembles coarse meal. Combine chives, pepper, 1/3 cup milk, and yogurt, stirring with a whisk. Add to flour mixture; stir just until moist.
Turn dough out onto a floured surface; knead lightly 3 times. Pat dough to a 3/4-inch thickness; cut with a (2-inch) biscuit cutter. Place on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray; brush with 2 teaspoons milk. Bake at 400° for 18 minutes or until lightly browned.