Jack's bucket came back to the scale with maybe a pound and a half of berries in it and a red ring all the way around his mouth. The woman running the scale looked at him, looked at the bucket and charged us only for what was in it, which was generous. Our total for the morning was eleven pounds at $3.75 a pound, $41.25, plus one seven-year-old who did not want lunch.
The farm is south of Columbia, about forty minutes from our house, and it opens for picking around the first good weekend in May. We went last Saturday right at 8, before the rows got crowded. Nora picked like she was being graded. She worked one row slowly, only the dark red ones with green caps, and put the white-shouldered berries back on the plant. Jack picked like a raccoon.
Eleven pounds is a lot of berries for four people. We ate a bowl in the car, I froze about four pounds whole on a sheet pan and bagged them for later, and on Sunday, which was also Mother's Day, I made the thing I'd been thinking about since we parked: strawberry shortcake on drop biscuits, the way Granny June served it on her back porch every May.
Biscuit, not sponge
Granny's shortcake was a sweet biscuit, split while it was still warm, with berries spooned over the bottom half so the juice soaked in. The little yellow sponge cups at the grocery store are a different dessert. They start out soft, so the juice turns them to paste. A biscuit has a crust and a sturdy crumb that can take it.
Drop biscuits are the easy kind. No rolling, no cutting, and the craggy tops get crunchy with a little sugar. The one rule is cold ingredients and very little stirring. When flour and liquid are stirred together, they build gluten, the stretchy protein that makes bread chewy. Stir a lot and you get a tough, flat biscuit. Stir until it barely comes together, a few dry streaks and all, and it stays tender. I learned this the year I let the KitchenAid do the mixing and baked eight hockey pucks.
Ingredients
- 2 cups White Lily all-purpose flour (or 1 3/4 cups regular all-purpose)
- 3 tablespoons sugar, plus 1 tablespoon for the tops
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 6 tablespoons cold butter, cut in small cubes
- 1 cup cold heavy cream, plus a splash for brushing
- 2 pounds strawberries, hulled and sliced
- 1/4 cup sugar for the berries
- For the whipped cream: 1 1/2 cups cold heavy cream, 2 tablespoons powdered sugar, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
How I make it
- Toss the sliced berries with 1/4 cup sugar and leave them on the counter for 30 minutes, stirring once, so they make their own syrup. Heat the oven to 425°F and line a sheet pan with parchment.
- Whisk the flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, baking powder and salt. Cut in the butter with a pastry blender or your fingertips until the biggest pieces are about the size of peas.
- Pour in the cold cream and stir with a fork, about ten strokes, just until there's no dry flour left in the bottom of the bowl. It should look shaggy.
- Drop 8 mounds onto the pan a couple of inches apart. Brush with a little cream and sprinkle with sugar.
- Bake 14 to 16 minutes, until the tops are golden and the bottoms are browned when you tip one up.
- Whip the cold cream with the powdered sugar and vanilla to soft peaks.
- Split the biscuits while they're warm. Bottom half, a big spoon of berries and juice, whipped cream, top half, more berries.
Make-ahead: drop the dough onto a parchment-lined pan, freeze the mounds solid, then bag them. Bake straight from the freezer and add about 3 minutes. If you don't have cream for the dough, use 3/4 cup cold buttermilk and bump the butter up to a full stick.
What a bowl costs
I did the math because I can't help myself. One bowl, meaning a biscuit, about a cup of berries and a big spoon of cream, came to roughly $2 with our U-pick berries. That same week the store had one-pound clamshells for $3.99, and with a pack of sponge cups and a can of whipped cream, the store version worked out to about $2.35 a bowl. So the savings are real but small, about a quarter a bowl.
Honestly, U-pick isn't where we save money. It's a Saturday morning in a field and berries that are red all the way through instead of white in the middle. You can smell them from across the kitchen. Jack ate two bowls on Sunday and gave it a nine out of ten. He took a point off because his berries were "too juicy," which I'm choosing to hear as a compliment.
