Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 stick cold unsalted butter
3/4 to 1 cup buttermilk
Steps:
0. Shortly before you bake, preheat the oven to 450. Yes, that sounds hot. It is hot. Are you here to bake or not?
1. Mix all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Order does not matter. In this one instance, all hierarchies may be left behind.
2. On a plate, cut the cold, unsalted butter into tiny pieces. No less than 32, but 64 would be better. If you are German, you may wish to devise a process to make such cuts in the most efficient way possible.
NOTE: If you have salted butter, instead of unsalted butter, decrease the salt by 1/4 teaspoon. It won’t be enough. It will never be enough. And yet you can’t omit the salt entirely. That would be too much. Do you understand? The amount of salt in a stick of salted butter is fundamentally unknowable. What is known is that the biscuits will either be too salty or not salty enough, and the only thing between these two poles is a seemingly inconsequential 1/4 teaspoon. Like so many things, these minute differences divide the successes from the failures, the blissful from the desolate. Which will you be? If you use unsalted butter, this question would not apply to you, and you would already have moved onto the next step, ignorant of the cliff face you just danced along. The point is that it is unknowable to you, and therefore, no matter what you do, the recipe will be off. As stated before, the biscuits will either be too salty, or not salty enough. Even if by some wonderful chance you happen to add in the exact balance of reduced salt to counter the salted butter that you should not have used in the first place, you will be discontent, wondering if the saltiness is what it should be, or if you—like so many others in this world—have veered off course, over-corrected in your efforts to conform, if your life is no longer the life you were intended to live and is now the life your mother always feared you would fall into. You should not have used the salted butter. In any case, if you insist on using a stick of salted butter, reduce the salt to about 1/4 teaspoon. It will probably work out ok in the end.
3. Re-refrigerate the cut up butter for 10 to 20 minutes, if necessary, to ensure that it is firm and cold. Not cool. Cold. Cold like death.
4. Add the tiny pieces of butter to the dry ingredients. Cut in the butter with a pastry cutter, or with your fingers. Either way, work quickly and dispassionately. Cut or roll the butter into ever smaller pieces among the dry ingredients, until the whole mixture resembles gritty sand. You should not see any recognizable chunks of butter, only a surface that, if you squint, might be mistaken for the surface of an arid moon.
NOTE: At this point, you may refrigerate the whole bowl for a time, both to recool the butter, or to wait until dinner.
5. Immediately before you intend to bake the biscuits, make a well in the center of the mixture and pour in 3/4 cup of buttermilk. Using a rubber scraper or wooden spoon, mix just enough to make the dough hold together—you may need to add more buttermilk to achieve the right consistency. Do this one tablespoon at a time, until there are no dry bits left.
6. Working quickly, create a single ball of sticky dough in the center of the bowl. Then, using a sharp knife, cut the whole ball into equal sized wedges (12 is ideal). Take each wedge and shape it into a rough ball, then place on an ungreased baking sheet. Don’t chase perfection here. Don’t roll out or overwork the dough in any way. The less you sully the dough with your imperfect human hands, the lighter and finer the results will be.
7. Bake for 10 to 13 minutes, until the tops turn golden. Take out of oven and remove from pan. Don’t forget to turn the oven off. 450 is not a temperature for the faint of heart, and even in this small way, you are expending energy, and thus contributing to the eventual heat death of the universe.
8. Enjoy! Biscuits are best when served immediately, but will still be palatable for another 24 to 48 hours. Equally tasty with either sweet or savory toppings. Cooled, they make an excellent base for strawberry shortcake.
Tags: baking, biscuits, food, jocelyn koehler, recipes
This recipe is the truth. Biscuits can be made with less folderol and they may still be delicious, but they will not be perfect.
Except I’ve never had a too-salty biscuit. (I’ve never had a too-salty anything.)
Going to the store to buy unsalted butter and buttermilk.
you can make buttermilk with milk and vinegar!
Or milk and lemon! Once I learned this–either the lemon or the vinegar–my life has been full of tangy, fluffy pastries.
Not for biscuits! Don’t do it; it will be worse than using salted butter!
In some cases, though, Greek yogurt can be used, for an acceptable, but not perfect, biscuit.
a mixture of whole milk and yoghurt (the most basic and plain you can get, greek or natural) works best. 3/4 yoghurt to 1/4 milk.
Mark Bittman uses plain yogurt in his biscuit recipe and while the flavor is good, the consistency is not flaky enough.
I only had skim milk and balsamic vinegar, so that would not work. I was going to the store anyway, so just had to add a couple of items. Now I am ready to bake.
The amount of salt in a stick of salted butter is fundamentally unknowable.
I was just wondering about this, this morning.
And also the best method for cutting butter pieces is to stack the sticks, cut once down the center vertically, stack again, and cut, and repeat as often as possible.
God, I love biscuits so much. And yet I have never succeeded in making the perfect, fluffy Southern biscuit. Damnit, I want to be able to put “Has an excellent biscuit hand” in the list of my legitimate accomplishments, but I cannot.
I have heard, but cannot confirm from personal experience, that this is the essential key to the perfect Southern biscuit: http://www.whitelily.com/. Let us know if you try it.
Excellently written.
I strongly recommend Smitten Kitchen’s honeyed brown butter (found at http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2011/03/sally-lunn… to go with buttermilk biscuits.
And I may now make both of these this weekend.
You know, I’m sick and tired of all the sated butter shaming I see in baking circles these days.
But in all seriousness, yum, biscuits. I know what I want to bake and eat tonight. Thank you!
David Lebovitz’s recipes are awesome and he definitely does not hate on the salted butter: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/08/baking-ingre…
You know, I went to the link and he says this: Salt preserves things and unsalted butter was believed to be fresher. It’s not just a belief–salted butter goes wayyyyy back (Falstaff calls someone a saltbutter rogue in The Merry Wives of Winsdor) and salting was definitely to preserve and even export the butter. In 16th century England, your saltbutter probably came from Belgium days or weeks ago but your fresh butter came from English cows recently.
What I don’t know is: why is salted butter a thing now, when we can refrigerate and even freeze unsalted butter? I mean, I’ll use it if it’s all I have (the closest stores to me sell only salted) but I haven’t come across any explanations of when or why salted butter might be preferable. Genuinely curious.
I’ve spent a good part of the last hour trying to find out! One good point is that if you have really good-quality salt for artisanal butter churned by Bretons (probably on their farms overlooking the sea while drinking cider, mmm), then it *can* really enhance the flavour ( though to be fair, this butter is probably already amazing).
The short answer, I suppose, is that people are used to salted butter? It also seems to be the butter that goes on sale in shops the most where I live and cook (southern QC), and I don’t generally have several sticks of butter around at once, so I buy salted and cut the salt in whatever I’m baking.
This article, though, suggests that I’m affecting the water content in my pastries by doing so.. <a href=”http://.http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/baking.html” target=”_blank”>.http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/baking.html
That link is amazing. First of all, I am just delighted to know that there is a site in the world called BUTTER THROUGH THE AGES. Second, I knew there were some significant structural differences between shortening and butter, but I did not know that salted butter has a higher water content than unsalted. That makes it still less preferable in baking, I’d think.
Well, I’m never going to be a fan, but I just made a bunch of compound butters and muffins with the salted that I got from a nearby drug store (emergency muffin butter! not a euphemism!), so whatever, it still works.
Ahahaha! It’s not an emergency anymore, because you have butter!
If you think that’s amazing, there’s a book called Milk that I personally found fascinating. See also Salt.
As someone who makes biscuits and churns her own butter I can tell you that salt is a preservative in butter. In “the olden days” salt would allow butter to keep longer (otherwise you end up with a greasy rancid lump in no time) because it tends to draw the water which remains in the butter following churning. Modern evil mechanical food processing is able to get out all of the buttermilk when churning. As a mere mortal I am unable to do that. Hence the salt.
Or you could just eat way too much salt for your own good so that your taste buds are immune and you never know that your salted-butter biscuits were too salty, not that I have this problem.
Anyway, this article has increased the likelihood of homemade biscuits in my near future to 10000%.
YES I think I have trained my body to require more salt than usual? I also drink more water than anyone I know so these two things might be related. If I think something is too salty then I have either accidentally ingested seawater (again) OR I should really look into this whole “taste-and-season-as-you-go” thing.
Biscuit hack: I often put my butter in the freezer and then grate it into the flour. Saves cutting-the-butter-into-teeny-tiny-squares AND makes the dough come together faster.
Those who use salted butter in baking are heretics and I will not be associated with them. Bless this recipe for discouraging their heathen philosophy.
Assume we are talking Farenheit 450?
Yep yep! (If not, I am deeply fearful.)
Yesssss, a recipe for biscuits that look just like my gramma’s and also has better instructions than “a handful of this, a pinch of that, until it looks right.”
On another note, have you ever heard the saying, “a bad woman can’t make good biscuits”? I’m looking forward to proving that one wrong.
Haven’t heard it but I join you in your plan to prove it wrong.
Yes! I so miss my grandma’s exasperation whenever anyone tried to nail down precise measurements for her recipes. “Honey, I don’t know exactly, just a pinch!”
This is why I cannot cook with anybody else. I had a boyfriend with generalized anxiety disorder, and trying to cook with me made him genuinely freak out.
The recipe’s not bad for the dough, but drop biscuits are just a sad shortcut, a little like baking an angel food cake from scratch, 12 egg whites and all, and then serving it with Reddi-whip. After taking the trouble to cut the butter into the flour, you deserve the subtle flaky miracle that happens when you fold the dough over twice, then roll it out on a little flour and cut it with biscuit cutter or with the edge of my grandmother’s silver cup before baking.
Agreed! The trick is to include the rolling out as part of the mixing, i.e. start rolling while still very shaggy and not entirely mixed.
Could I get some suggestions of savoury things to top these with?
I’m from Texas and thus believe that biscuits require gravy. I make this mushroom gravy a lot : http://www.abeautifulmess.com/2012/12/buttermilk-…
This was delicious (with a bunch of bacon and sausage added to it I have no shame).
Stew thick enough to be a kind of sauce. (I like a beef or lamb stew but YMMV)
ETA: Before baking grate some cheese on top. Or stick a sausage in the middle of each dough ball for a delicious to-go snack.
Pan-fried country ham w/or w/out cheese; pimento cheese; fried chicken breasts. Gravy’s a natural – sausage gravy, if you’re me.
Ermergerd. This all sounds ammmmazing, but I’m so west coast I feel like I’ll end up just topping them with wilted kale.
Sauteed kale would be delicious with some pimento cheese and bacon 🙂 Or if you REALLY need to rep the hippycrunchygranola thing, you can use a vegan nutritional yeast gravy with veggie sausage.
Oooooh yuuummm.
I totally made sausage gravy and it was the right choice. (I also added some bacon and mushrooms.) I bought kale, but it’s still in the fridge.
Red-eye sausage gravy.
Drop biscuits forever because I can’t deal with the mess of rolling out and cutting. Absolutely refuse to deal.
100% with you. Rolling requires that I clean off counter and then clean it again once I’m done. Drop biscuits are a one bowl operation.
Drop biscuits is one of the first recipes I really mastered, and thus I can whip them out in no time.
Pro tip: if you want to impress someone who just stayed the night at your house, make your standard egg & bacon (or egg & sausage or egg & whatever) breakfast SUDDENLY IMPRESSIVE with fresh, steamy biscuits. Gets ’em every time. Don’t forget to set out the butter and jam.
One of the many, many tragedies of Celiacs is the biscuit situation. HOWEVER: this recipe is as close as I’ve come to an actual biscuit experience. Note how it is mostly starch and butter. It has almost no real nutritional value, and that is totally fucking fine because you will get to eat a goddamn flaky BISCUIT for the first time in years. I like to make a batch and then drop them on top of a cassoulet type thing in the winter time, all thick with beans and celery and root vegetables and rich with wine. Or you know, plain with butter and jam. Man, I am definitely making some biscuits this weekend.
Tonight, all Toasties are also Biscuities.
Man, I can’t believe the die-hard White Lily Flour believers aren’t here in droves.
May I share the laziest biscuit recipe of all time? These are not quire as perfect as be-all end-all buttermilk biscuits BUT have the advantage of being prepared in 5 minutes:
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Dump a bunch of self-raising flour into a bowl. Add some heavy cream and mix until the dough just sticks together. Either drop on a sheet pan or roll out and cut. Bake for … 15 or 20 minutes? Until they’re golden-brown-and-delicious. Eat a whole pile with honey and butter.
The trick is that the heavy cream acts as both the liquid and the fat, so you get to skip a whole bunch of steps, and the self-raising flour makes the biscuits rise really high, so the step of cutting in the fat isn’t really missed.
yes! I use all-purpose flour and add the rising agents and salt I want them to have, but I truly prefer cream in my biscuits — it’s just butter and milk anyway. if you want to make buttermilk cream biscuits, simply make and use creme fraiche instead of regular heavy cream. works like a charm and the biscuits can even be rolled and cut, and will come out beautifully light, because you didn’t have to overwork the dough.
I can’t be the only lumbering Brit who squinted at that recipe thinking ‘if these are BISCUITS why is there not more SUGAR’
divided by a common language and whatnot <3 these look delicious!
Me too, although Australian, not British, but still with the whole biscuit/cookie thing. I looked at the picture and thought, hang about, that looks more like an English muffin or… OH, it’s THAT kind of biscuit! And then re-read the whole thing again in American.
Ah! I hope I didn’t erase Australian English!
I’ve got an Australian friend (from Brisbane) and we were talking about chips/crisps the other day, she mentioned ‘hot chips’, but I’ve forgotten what it corresponded to.
Growing up I remember avidly reading a YA novel set in Australia in quite a poor rural area about a sister and brother (their house burns down I think? wish I could remember the title) and wondering what a lamington was and what Anzac Day was… poor show, Scottish education system!!!! Ah if the Toast had been around then, with Commonwealth Day to guide us…
Ha, not at all 😀
Really, the chips/chips thing is confusing. I mean, sure, most of the time you can use context to work it out, but we should totally use the crisp/chip method.
I’m intrigued about that book! It sounds interesting… and don’t worry, I had to rely on outside sources to learn anything about Scotland (which probably amounted to haggis and kilts, so, you know…)
Oh my god, is a “biscuit” just a kind of scone? This is AMAZING.
“If you are German, you may wish to devise a process to make such cuts in the most efficient way possible.”
You caught me there, that was exactly what I was thinking about when I came to read this sentence.
Me too, although Australian, not British, but still with the whole biscuit/cookie thing. I looked at the picture and thought, hang about, that looks more like an English muffin or… OH, it's THAT kind of biscuit! And then re-read the whole thing again in American.
Wow! Don't stop there, link us to your lifestyle blog. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Ha, not at all 😀
Really, the chips/chips thing is confusing. I mean, sure, most of the time you can use context to work it out, but we should totally use the crisp/chip method.
I'm intrigued about that book! It sounds interesting… and don't worry, I had to rely on outside sources to learn anything about Scotland (which probably amounted to haggis and kilts, so, you know…)
Just made these tonight and was delighted. This is the biscuit recipe I’ve been wanting since I lost my Grandma’s.