Biscuits and Belonging
Who am I and how did I end up with gochujang in my biscuits?
As usual my subconscious simmers with questions about identity. What’s bubbled up this week has been about where I come from, asking myself, Is Texas (where I was born & raised) considered part of the South? Do I have the right to claim Southern cooking as part of my identity? Is making a distinction between what is and is not “Southern” an elitist or colonialist inclination to re-establish the notion of borders? Is “the South” defined by geography, spirit, history, food, accent or something else? The answer I’ve arrived at is: who cares? Let’s just make some biscuits.
My grandma, who we called “Gans”, used to live in an east Texas town called Gladewater. It was about a 2 hour drive from Dallas, one that we took so often to visit her on the weekends. I think if my brain had a screensaver it would be the blurring of those tall loblolly pine trees in my passenger window, with the occasional fireworks or rose stand sprouting up along the way.
Upon arrival, the usual options for dinner were Bodacious BBQ, Guadalupe’s Mexican Restaurant, or Skipper's Pier: Coastal Cajun Kitchen. Usually she’d have her famous chocolate meringue pie sitting in the laundry closet on top of the washing machine ready for us to devour.
She’d make us biscuits and gravy for breakfast and to this day I can’t make biscuits without thinking of her. I’d wake to find her standing in the kitchen, dusty blue apron tied around her waist, rolling out the dough and cutting it into tidy rounds. She had the smallest, most nimble hands that knew exactly the mechanics required to work with dough. Of course I wanted to be part of the action and help form the biscuits, and she’d let me—keeping an eye that I didn’t spread them too thin or press down too hard, making them uneven. The time I spent with her feels more indicative of where I’ve come from than what the census bureau deems “the South”, which does include Texas.
The beautiful thing about biscuits is their simplicity—a blank canvas for those who might want something sweet or savory, or both at the same time. A biscuit, more specifically the Southern biscuit, is synonymous with comfort.
They can be worked like bread, kneaded and rolled out with a pin, training them for a sturdiness appropriate for ladles of white gravy and sausage. Or, they can be flakey and layered, treated with a more precious hand, similar to that of pastry—in a way that delicately encourages the dough to just come together.
This week, I tested these two biscuit extremes and am happy to say there’s no contest—they’re both totally excellent. However, the recipe I’m sharing falls into the flakey, layered category. The addition of gochujang wasn’t so much planned as it was an impulsive experiment. During a batch of biscuit-making I saw the gochujang in my fridge and wondered, why shouldn’t I add this to biscuits? Whether or not I’m a Southerner, I sure as hell am an American. How often have aspects of our culture been cobbled together by the entitled taking from others? For instance, the roots of Southern cooking.
I’m not sure what to make of this fact while also believing in the importance of food’s evolution through combining efforts to create new, beautiful culinary experiences. I think, like death, food is a great equalizer—a window into each other’s humanity if we’re willing to be mindful of where it came from.
Gochujang has a long history and the stewards of the practice maybe didn’t intend for someone to add it to biscuits. I decided to pursue this recipe with the inclusion of gochujang because it made the biscuits savory, a little spicy and kind of addicting. I hope my recipe does right by the tradition.
Gochujang Biscuits
For this recipe (for every recipe), I’m standing on the shoulders of giants—combining Alison Roman’s Luckiest Biscuit recipe, Edna Lewis’s Biscuits, and incorporating Claire Saffitz’s method for pie dough.
In one of my tests I accidentally forgot to add the gochujang until I was already shaping the dough on my counter. I decided to add it on top and work it in as a layer between dough folds. This is an excellent example of a problem becoming the solution, because these biscuits turned out to be the best I made. The method of incorporating the butter in two stages already makes these biscuits super tender and flakey, but waiting until the end to add the gochujang creates pockets of flavor which are delightful to eat. However, if you prefer incorporating the gochujang more evenly, you can add it to your buttermilk, and I’ve included this approach at the end of the recipe.
Dry Ingredients
3 cups / 395g flour
1 tbsp / 15g baking powder
½ tsp / 4g baking soda
1 tbsp / 10g Diamond Crystal kosher salt
½ tbsp / 7g sugar
Fat Phase 1
(The butter is added in two phases, so keep these measurements separate.)
¼ cup / 41g lard
⅓ cup /63g cold butter, cubed
Fat phase 2
1 stick / ½ cup / 110g cold butter, cubed or cut into somewhat thin slices
Wet Ingredients
⅔ cup/162g buttermilk + extra for brushing
½ cup/133g gochujang (I used the brand Sempio, but I encourage you to find a brand you like. There’s a pretty decent range of hot, sweet, funky and savory on the market.)
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
Whisk the Dry Ingredients together in a large bowl.
In the bowl of Dry Ingredients, work the lard and butter from Fat Phase 1 in with your fingertips until it becomes a sandy texture. This will help create a tender biscuit.
In the bowl of Dry Ingredients, add the remaining butter from Fat Phase 2, press each cube or slice of butter between your thumb and forefinger so that it squishes into super thin, lacey pieces (~1mm thick). These larger pieces of butter will help create a flakey biscuit. If the butter is soft at this point, put the bowl in the freezer until it’s cold (about 10 minutes) and the butter has firmed up.
From the Wet Ingredients, drizzle about ⅓ of the buttermilk at a time over the flour/fat mixture in your bowl and use your hands to lightly “scoop” flour from the sides of the bowl into the middle. Once you’ve added all the buttermilk, it shouldn’t really have formed a dough and that’s to be expected.
At this stage, use your hands to more firmly encourage the ingredients in your bowl to come together at which point it should start shaping up like a dough. I try to be as delicate as I can at this stage—I think of this action as massaging the dough rather than kneading.
Once most of it has come together (there will still be some dry spots and flour-y bits), dump the bowl onto a clean surface. With your hands, not a rolling pin or other tool, gently pat down and shape the dough into a rectangle. You can use your judgment as far as size, but I’d aim for roughly 6”x12”-ish.
Take about half of the gochujang from Wet Ingredients and pour it over the dough, it will feel like too much but it’s not. Use a rubber spatula or spoon to spread it over dough—this doesn’t need to be super precise, just looking for decent coverage.
Similar to a puff pastry, fold ~⅓ of the top rectangle onto itself and the other ⅓ over the top—like a letter fold. You may need to sprinkle some flour over the mixture if it becomes too sticky.
Again, pat down the dough and shape it into another rectangle.
Pour the remaining gochujang how you did previously and fold it in thirds again.
Pat and shape into another rectangle. The top should be fairly smooth and this final shape will be however thick you wish your biscuits to be. I shape mine to be pretty thick, maybe 2 inches before I cut them into my final biscuits.
Place your biscuits on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet, and don’t forget to brush the tops with buttermilk and add flakey salt.
Bake the biscuits for about 15-20 minutes, checking them periodically. Rotate the pan about 7 minutes into baking. Once they are browned on the top and around the edges and have puffed up, take them out of the oven and let them rest for about 20 minutes more.
Alternative Option
From the Wet Ingredients, mix the gochujang and buttermilk together before adding to your flour.
Follow instructions from step 7
Skip step 8
Follow instructions from step 9 & step 12-14