Home › Recipes › Graham Biscuits
Graham Biscuits
Make a dough the same as for Standard Biscuit, using half Graham and half white flour. Many persons prefer all Graham flour. All or part entire wheat flour can be used in the same way.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's Standard Biscuit in front of you, which is an American baking-powder biscuit, not a sweet cookie. Everything here concerns what swapping in graham flour actually does to that dough.
- Graham flourGraham flour is whole wheat milled coarsely, with the bran and germ left in and unsifted. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing; ordinary supermarket whole wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crumb.
- "Entire wheat flour"The period term for what we now simply call whole wheat flour. In this book it is treated as interchangeable with graham, and for practical purposes it is.
- Add liquid, not flourBran and germ absorb noticeably more milk than white flour. Expect to need roughly a tablespoon or two more liquid per cup of graham flour substituted, and mix to a dough that feels slightly wetter than the white version.
- Handle less, not moreBran fragments are generally held to interfere with the gluten network, so kneading and re-rolling may do more damage here than in a white biscuit. Pat out once, cut, and bake; scraps re-rolled a second time are likely to be tough and squat.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. For a modern baking-powder biscuit, a hot oven of about 425-450F, upper-middle rack, 12 to 15 minutes until the tops are browned and the sides feel set.
- All-graham resultsThe "many persons prefer all Graham" version rises less and stays denser and moister. It is a good biscuit but a different one; half and half is the safer choice if you want lift.
- Flour storageGraham and whole wheat flours contain the oily germ and go rancid within a few months at room temperature. Smell the flour before using it, and keep it in the freezer if it sits around.
- YieldThe Standard Biscuit's quantities are not given here; a biscuit dough made with roughly two cups of flour would give about 10 to 12 biscuits cut at two inches. Best eaten the day they are baked.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), a Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose lectures argued that white bolted flour stripped wheat of what the body needed, and that coarse unsifted meal was the wholesome alternative. His followers baked graham bread and graham crackers well before either was a commercial product; in time American mills were selling bagged graham flour and household cookbooks treated it, along with "entire wheat," as an everyday pantry option rather than a health-reform curiosity. That is exactly how it appears here: not as a separate recipe but as a one-line substitution into the book's standard biscuit, the kind of note whose point was to show that the same reliable dough would take whatever flour the reader had in the bin.