Anyone can turn out light, tasty biscuits

Watching Lauren Vinciguerra make biscuits is poetry in motion.

She pours, mixes, rolls and shapes with sureness and efficiency. When she's done, just a few minutes after she started, 5 pounds of flour, a pound of butter, a pound and a half of cream cheese and a half gallon of buttermilk have been transformed into 126 biscuits filling a sheet pan, ready to go into the oven.

As manager of Callie's Charleston Biscuits, Vinciguerra is used to baking in quantity. Her South Carolina bakery makes about 80,000 biscuits a month, all by hand.

"That's our forte," she says.

Nathalie Dupree takes a different tack. Her recipes make enough biscuits to mound in a bread basket. Instead of buttermilk, she mixes cream and plain yogurt.

"The reality is, most people have yogurt in the house more than they have buttermilk," says Dupree, author with Cynthia Graubart of "Southern Biscuits" (Gibbs Smith, $21.99).

Despite the differences, they both make biscuits more by feel than by measure.