Let me be clear, this is not meant to be braggy, but matter-of-fact.
I make INCREDIBLE buttermilk biscuits. Tiny towers of fluffy layers, gorgeously golden. crackly crust on top, tender within. The perfect vehicle for everything from more butter to a whole breakfast sandwich, I spent a full winter perfecting them in college, and it shows.
After trying to advise more than one friend who was struggling with baking their own biscuits, I realized that with this situation here, talk is cheap. Perfect biscuits come from using a gentle touch, minding the texture, and a spiffy technique… and it’s easiest to show you how I do that with video, so I made a reel.
But first, let’s talk ingredients for a second. Recipes can be very pickypants, but biscuits are simple food. Buttermilk is what I normally use, because i keep it on hand, but whole milk clabbered with a spoonful of yogurt or a little lemon juice stirred in works just as easily. Some people insist on only White Lily flour, and while it’s true the protein content helps keep your biscuits light, let’s keep it real- grannies made bomb biscuits with whatever fat and flour they could scrounge, so, settle down. I use this recipe as my base, and am making a double batch in the video.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CZXdt4pPMvh/
Okay, now that we’ve talked basics, let’s talk difference makers.
The colder, the better, when it comes to butter, so I dice it and then pop it back into the fridge or freezer until it’s biscuit time.
Most recipes tell you to break the butter into the flour until you have pea sized chunks. No, thank you- endeavor to flatten the butter chunks like coins through a penny press instead. Thin layers of fat help the lamination process along for buttery layers. In the video, I’m doing this at :15.
Don’t overmix- that develops the gluten and toughens your biscuits. You want to stir liquid into the flour just til it’s absorbed- it won’t come together yet, you’ll have a bowlful mostly clumps in flour. But trust the process- even when it seems like a shaggy mess, go ahead and dump it onto the counter, and pat and scrape it (0:26 in the reel) into a mass of dough.
Once you’ve gotten your dough together, it’s time to roll and fold (starting at :31). This technique was a game changer for me when it came to creating the perfect flaky layers in my biscuits, and I especially like it because it doesn’t need perfect execution to be successful. No need to add any more flour, you just want to fold the dough onto itself, roll it out flat, rotate and repeat until it’s stacking nicely.
I deviate from the norm here by almost always passing on biscuit cutters. The biscuits made from rerolled scraps are usually a bit overworked, so they never rise as high or taste as tender, and that usually makes them a pass and a waste for me. Unless I’m needing a special shape (like heart buttermilk biscuits for a valentine’s brunch), I avoid by using a pastry scraper to make squares (and it makes for swift cleanup, too).
Make sure to brush with melted butter both before and after baking, and enjoy! We like them with more butter, hot honey, or jam- and they make amazing fried chicken biscuits.
love, Ravayna
