A new beginning! And our biscuit recipe with instructions!

Helloooo!  Our favorite people!  Welcome!  How have you been? We know we see you every week, but we don't always have time to stop and chat.  So, we would like to start from the beginning.  Get it right this time.  We are Jessie and Kait, the intuition behind the Greenhouse concept.  Have you ever noticed how wonderfully fluid a concept is?  It starts as this one great idea, so BIG and BRIGHT and MESSY and morphs into a more defined map, with little ideas stemming from it, flowing their own ways, sometimes joining other ideas before breaking away and ebbing towards their own destinies.  Our core concept is and always will be the same:  To give you our best through nourishing, well planned menu items with a sense of humor, and a genuine smile within a community.  Food is fun!  Snacks are delicious!  Our neighbors are beautiful!  We want to give you the world, in our own way.  Through this medium, we hope to get to know you a little better, give you the space to get to know us, if you would like.  We want to share stories here, recipes, ideas, future concepts.  Invite our staff to contribute on occasion (Speaking of, do you know how LUCKY we are to have such an incredible staff?!  These sweet people come in with the sole mission of making your day a little better.  They laugh, are innovative, fun and motivated.  (Did we mention they're also amazing at making lattes, sandwiches, biscuits and more?!))

So where do we start?  The humble biscuit.  The beautiful ode to breakfast.  The one lump of pastry that can be made 1000 ways, each way delicious, each way touted as the “best” by their makers.  We aren't any different!  This is the best biscuit!  It’s a cross between a drop biscuit and soft biscuit.  It's lumpy, it’s crunchy, it's soft and tender on the inside, perfectly beautiful in its imperfection! Anyone can whip this up in a matter of minutes with just a little practice.

Kait began making biscuits a long long time ago, not because she loves biscuits, but because she loves making jam.  In fact, she was trying to hustle her jam at a tiny farmers market at the time.  She was having a hard time.  Her jams looked pretty, but people were skeptical.  A sweet and very kind dear southern lady finally took her aside and showed her the true power of a biscuit: it goes with everything.  This sweet lady taught Kait the art of the biscuit, how not to over mix it, and how there is a lot of forgiveness in the making of a biscuit.  Over time, Kait developed her own biscuit recipe, and continued to make jam.  Then she met Jessie, and Jessie loves small cafe’s, amazing coffee, and art (both making and curating).   BOOM. Through their joint love of cooking and their personal passions this fluid concept began.  Fast forward a lot of years and a whole lot of biscuits, cups of coffee, and art shows and here we are still making, still learning, still having fun!  

We’ve shared our biscuit recipe a million times.  It's in the shop on a postcard.  A couple local restaurants use it, but here it is again.  Just for you. Again.  Because we love it and we love our community built on biscuits!


GREENHOUSE BISCUIT RECIPE!

Ingredients:

  • 500 g of flour (4 c) + more for dusting

  • 1 tsp salt

  • Few twists fo black pepper

  • 2 T baking powder

  • 1 c cold butter (2 sticks), cubed into dime sized pieces

  • 2 c buttermilk

Tools:

  • large bowl

  • stiff spatula (or wooden spoon)

  • pastry cutter (optional)

  • bench scraper (optional)

  • large knife

Directions (PHOTOS BELOW)

  1. Preheat oven to 475 F.

  2. Line a 9” x 13” pan with parchment paper or grease it with butter

  3. In a large bowl combine the flour, salt, pepper and baking powder. 

  4. Add butter cubes into the dry ingredients.

  5. Using your fingers (using a snapping motion) or pastry cutter, break butter into small chunks no larger than a dime. 

  6. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add 1 3/4 cups buttermilk.  Using your spatula, mix until the dough just comes together. Add more buttermilk if it’s too dry. It should be lightly tacky, flour streaks are alright, do not over mix. 

  7. Dust a dry surface with flour. Dump dough and sprinkle a little more flour on top.

  8. Shape into a rectangle approximately 6” x 8” x 1.5”h and cut into 12 square biscuits.

  9. Place 1⁄2 inch apart on a baking sheet and bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden. IF you have a convection oven and want to use it, bake for 12, turning half way through.

BIG FAT SIDE NOTE!!!!

In the pictures you may notice I am not using buttermilk.  Im using water.  WHAT?!  So here’s the deal.  We have purchased hundreds of thousands of ½ gallons of buttermilk.  Its amazing stuff isnt it?  BUT, IMAGINE THAT PLASTIC WASTE.  We cannot find it from any of our purveyors in large sizes.  So after doing some math (Kait dragging her heels, and using her fingers, Jessie whizzing through it like the number genius she is)  we found that a single 5 lb bag of buttermilk powder is the equivalent to 12 half gallons of buttermilk.  AN ENTIRE CASE  fits into a single 12 x 14” bag.  We love our planet.  We hate plastic (but understand it's necessary in some cases).  SO if you want to scoff at buttermilk plastic waste and buy buttermilk powder DO IT!  Most grocery stores carry it (in the section with the evaporated milk and such).  Use 50g of it in this recipe (mixed in with the flour at the beginning) and start with 1.5c of water.  I'm sure we will touch on our passionate dislike and commitment to using alternative materials at a future date! 

Kait SukiennikRecipe, Biscuits7 Comments