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Dessert

Sour Milk Biscuits

Sour Milk Biscuits are quick biscuits made with sour milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, salt, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sour Milk Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make and shape the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine the sour milk, baking soda, flour, cream of tartar, salt, and lard. Mix until a soft dough forms.

  2. Shape the dough into biscuits and place them on a baking sheet.

Bake

  1. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the leavening to help the biscuits rise and stay tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk and cream of tartar to produce gas that lifts the biscuits.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough once its proteins hydrate and set in the oven.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that works with the baking soda to leaven the dough and add tang.
Lard
Fat that coats flour particles, tenderizing the crumb and creating flaky layers.

The step that matters

Mix until a soft dough forms. Overmixing develops gluten and makes biscuits tough, while the leavening needs to be activated promptly. Stop once the dough just comes together so the biscuits stay tender and rise well.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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