TIL my grandma's 60 year old biscuit recipe works better with cold lard than the butter I switched to
My grandma wrote her biscuit recipe on an index card back in 1963 and it always just said shortening, so when I ran out of Crisco last month I grabbed a tub of butter flavored shortening from the Piggly Wiggly on Route 9 and figured close enough. The biscuits came out flat and kind of greasy, and my husband asked if I was trying a new recipe, which is code for these are bad. So I went back to the plain white shortening, the cheap blue can, and the biscuits rose almost 2 inches and had those flaky layers you can pull apart. Same flour, same buttermilk, same oven at 450. Only thing that changed was the fat. I sat there staring at the baking sheet trying to figure out what I did different and it was just the damn shortening. Turns out the butter flavored stuff has water in it and that was wrecking the steam pockets that make them puff. Anyone else run into this with a family recipe, or am I the last one to figure this out?