I have experimented with different cooking fats. With liquid-at-room-temperature fats, such as coconut oil, olive oil, bacon fat, I’ve found freezing the dry ingredients before adding the fat helps to create a crumbly texture, before adding the liquid. Mother would use Swans Down and Crisco for Sunday biscuits. I avoid partially hydrogenated anything. I prefer to use K.A. pastry flour since it gives more leeway in kneading and shaping. Bacon fat and butter make for a tasty combo. No matter how hard I try I cannot achieve the texture of Mom’s biscuits whatever the recipe. Years of feeling and viewing the texture of the raw dough creates the intuition of knowing when to stop mixing and kneading, but not too soon for just the right texture. She would gently pat out the dough, then a roll or two before using the biscuit cutter. She never twisted the cutter.

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