Buttermilk Biscuits #4 & Cobbler #4

Tonight I tried the previous recipe for Biscuits, except using buttermilk instead of normal milk. I'm not sure if it was the buttermilk, or something I did, but the bottoms burnt pretty badly. Otherwise, the texture and taste turned out perfectly, but not really any different than before (using milk). So, given that I got basically the same results either way, I'm going to go with the method that required the non-specialty ingredient. Okay, one more change to go (half whole wheat flour), then I think I'm pretty much done.

Tonight I also made a cherry cobbler. I was thinking about my previous recipe, and had a thought: in evolutionary biology (my day-job), there is this concept called an "adaptive peak." It's a situation where you have evolved to the best you can be, and no small changes will bring improvement. You are not necessarily the best you can be, just the best in that template. How does that involve cooking? Well, lately I've been making tinkering and tinkering with one recipe for cobbler. I'm convinced that within a couple more iterations, I'll have the best possible version of that recipe (if I don't have it already). But, it could be that there is a radically different cobbler out there, that is even better. So, I thought I'd try something radically different, just to give it a test.

Tonight's cobbler was made of the standard cobbler filling (except cherries this time, which turned out really well), with biscuit dough as a topping. Literally, I made extra biscuit dough, and then dropped a lot of half-sized biscuits on top of an already cooked filling. I then put this concoction in a 500F oven, and baked it for 9 minutes (the same as the biscuits). The result: a cobbler that tasted like biscuits sitting on top of fruit filling, rather than a well-integrated desert. The bottoms of the biscuits soaked up a little of the juice, but for the most part, it was pretty separate, and tasted pretty distinct. I could maybe try adding sugar to the biscuit dough if I really wanted to try this again, but at this point, I feel like it's probably not worth continuing down this avenue.