Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen Biscuits

A few years ago I had the TV on in the background while I was working on the computer, as I often do.  The program on at the time was "Food Paradise", a show on the travel channel that does short clips about various restaurants based around a particular theme.  An episode titled "Drive Thru Paradise" was on which highlighted places around the country that have outstanding drive-thru offerings.  One of the featured restaurants was Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen in Chapel Hill, NC.  I've never had the opportunity to try their biscuits myself, but as a southern transplant to a northern state anything biscuit related piques my interest.  As I was working on the computer I heard them go over their biscuit recipe, but I was unprepared and by the time I could grab a pen and paper it was over.  I searched on-line but the only version of the clip I could find omitted the recipe part, there seem to be several versions of Food Paradise's Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen clips but I never could find the one that included the recipe description.  Fast forward a few years and again I'm working on the computer with the TV on in the background.  Travel Channel is playing back-to-back-to-back episodes of Food Paradise and when the episode I saw a fews years back comes on I stop what I'm doing and get ready, just in case it's the version with the recipe.  And it was!

The recipe they gave is for a commercial size batch, it's also very short on details with only the list of ingredients and oven temperature.  The ingredients they listed are:

10 pounds flour
24 ounces margarine
1/2 gallon buttermilk
16 ounces water

I had to make a few assumptions about the ingredients.  Since no leaveners were listed I assumed the flour they used was self-rising, and since they are in the south I assumed they were using a soft wheat flour like White Lily (which was convenient since I had some White Lily self rising flour in the pantry!).  They didn't specify the margarine brand so I basically chose the one that was on sale that week (Blue Bonnet).  It has a pretty soft consistency which matched what was shown on Food Paradise.

The next step was to reduce the amounts to something more manageable.  First I converted the recipe to baker's percentages which came out like this:

100% Self rising flour
15% Margarine
43% Buttermilk
10% Water

For the first batch I went with two cups of flour, which is 226 grams, and calculated the rest of the ingredients based on the flour weight.  This resulted in a recipe consisting of:

226 grams Self-rising flour
34 grams Margarine
104 grams Buttermilk
22 grams water

The oven was pre-heated to 450°f.  Flour and margarine were weighed into a bowl, I rubbed the fat into the flour with my hands (they used a mixer for this in the clip) until it looked like cornmeal but with a few larger pieces still remaining.  The buttermilk and water were weighed, added to the fat/flour mix and everything was quickly mixed together with a spoon.  Once all the loose flour had been incorporated into the dough it was turned out onto a lightly floured surface, flattened and folded.  This was done three more times before the dough was flattened to about 1" thickness and biscuits cut out.  The biscuits were put on a parchment lined tray so they were just touching, the tops were brushed with a little buttermilk and put in the oven for about 15-18 minutes until the tops were browned.

The end result was a pretty damn good biscuit.  The repeated flattening/folding procedure produced some flakiness but the biscuit was sturdy enough to use for breakfast sandwiches or to douse with gravy.  I would probably add a little salt next time and I didn't get as much lift as I would have liked, probably due to the self-rising flour being a little old (about 10 months).  The oven temp could probably go up a little as well, next time I'll try 475°-500°f.  I'll have to try it with the locally available self-rising flour to see how that affects the final product.

I haven't had the opportunity to make another chocolate pie, but I still want to post the recipe.  May have to do so sans any pictures.  I've also just received a shipping confirmation for my Paragon Induction Cooktop, haven't decided for sure what I'm going to do with it first but I recently found a recipe for Nashville Hot Chicken so I'm thinking I may sous vide a chicken breast with the spice blend, bread it in seasoned flour and fry using the Paragon cooker.