Jessica Badalana
speaker
1,485 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Jessica Badalana’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yeah, I do. And then I feel like we can do some sort of personality test, like what your biscuit style says about you.
I think you're not alone in this. I feel like the world... Okay. I mean, this is to put it in a sort of binary, but I do think there's a big split between people that prefer the sort of fluffy style biscuit. I mean, I feel like I just am making a sport out of disagreeing with you all the time on this podcast, but I... I mean, I have, yeah, you know, you can't dress up your drive, I guess.
But I do like those soft biscuits. But if I'm making biscuits at home, and even if I am going to buy them at a bakery, I do like the sort of flaky, buttery, crispy edged biscuit. It's like, that's a little higher in stature. And it has that sort of cragginess. Maybe some salt on it or some salted butter or like...
You know, I read that Dwight Yoakam's grandmother used to top each one of her biscuits with like a little knob of bacon fat. That seems like a smart thing to me. So I actually, you know, I just have a right now my biscuit vibe is just a little bit different from yours, but I think represents a style of biscuit that's also quite popular.
I mean, any fresh biscuit, let's be clear here. Like whether it's a cream biscuit, a buttermilk biscuit, an all butter biscuit, all biscuits are good biscuits. But I think where biscuits get really interesting is thinking about the role that they have played in American baking history.
I love that the buttermilk powder is already added to the flour blend because, I mean, who keeps a carton of buttermilk on hand for when biscuit emergencies strike? Am I right?
It's time for our next segment, Ask the Bakers. For Ask the Bakers, we want to hear from you. If you have a baking question for us, head to kingarthurbaking.com forward slash podcast to record a voice message, and we may end up using it on the show. That's kingarthurbaking.com forward slash podcast.
Are you ready for today's biscuit questions? I'm ready.
What flour is best used for biscuits? Well, I mean, I think that's one of the most foundational and fundamental questions we could possibly have gotten, right?
Because like we said earlier, biscuits don't have a lot of ingredients, but flour is one of them. You know, we recently debuted a new product, which is our biscuit flour blend, which was an effort from our research and development team. They spent quite a bit of time and many, many biscuits were baked in pursuit of a flour blend that would make the perfect biscuits.
And I wanted to just get some insight from one of our R&D pros, Jonathan Brazil, who had this to say about our biscuit flour blend.
So I think Jonathan gets really to the heart of the matter here. The best flour for biscuits is a flour that's a lower protein flour. So we've talked about protein level in our flours before. Our all-purpose flour hovers around 11.7% protein, which is great for, as the name suggests, lots and lots of things.
But if you're looking, as Jonathan says, for this tender and fluffy biscuit, then what you want is actually a flour that is lower in protein. So rather than a flour that's milled from the hard winter wheat, like our all-purpose flour, This new biscuit flour blend is milled from a softer wheat. And so you have a lower protein flour.
And then when that is formed into a dough, it's just by its very nature going to have less gluten. It'll help with sort of the texture of the biscuit, right? And I think, David, you and I had talked before about just the handling too, right? It's not just the protein and just the dough, but how you mix it.
It's kind of like pie dough in that way, right?
Yeah, I like to grate too. And Tandem Bakery here in Portland, the baker there, Brianna Holt, she grates cold butter into cold flour. And then she folds. I mean, very much the same process that you would for any sort of pastry that you want to be like puffing up when it bakes. Yeah. I think those butter questions are great.
And again, like the flour questions, you know, what else can you fixate on, right? Like there's so few ingredients. So these details actually do matter. And I think that people find biscuits to be like perplexing in the same way that they find pie dough to be perplexing. So I think that we're talking about them together, you know, makes sense. I think we have one final question.
I mean, this is biscuit energy.
I do think there are some things just in terms of technique that will help no matter what the style of biscuit you're making, that will give you sort of good results. And that is to have a sharp cutter. If you're using a round cutter, whatever, it doesn't matter the shape, round cutter, square cutter, but a nice sharp metal cutter.
Or if you're cutting them with a knife, I think the same rules apply. You just cut straight down. You know, the temptation when you get to the cutting board after you've cut through the dough is to twist to sort of release the biscuit. And that is what you don't want to do because twisting sort of like seals off the edges of the biscuit dough. So then it's harder for those layers to separate.
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