Good morning. If you make biscuits (above) today — and you ought to — they ought to be terrific. But if you make biscuits today and do so again next weekend and the weekend after and the weekend after that, they will be terrific, the best biscuits ever. This is a matter of practice related to what martial artists call kata — a set pattern that rewards repetition with excellence.
The same goes for pizza dough — whether for pan pizza, Neapolitanish pizza or Chicago tavern-style pizza. “You’ve got to keep your hands in the flour,” the pizza lord Anthony Falco once told me, a reminder to always be making pizza dough, to be attuned to its particulars, to keep up the practice.
Probably this is true of jam making and cake baking, too, and of making pasta and tempering eggs. It’s certainly true of making hollandaise sauce. Indeed, regular repetition of any cooking technique will make you a better, more confident cook.
So let’s start with those biscuits. Make them this afternoon to accompany dinner (I’m thinking pork chops with onion gravy) and see where you find yourself. There’s pleasure in the practice, no?