Buttery Biscuits

Every weekend, I try to make these biscuits. They’re fluffy on the inside, with a buttery, flaky texture. Prepare to have a messy kitchen after you’re done making these, but they’re so worth it. The technique for rolling out the biscuits and forming them is from Chef Carla Hall. You can find her biscuit recipe here.

Ingredients

2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour

2 tsp. (8 g) baking powder

1/4 tsp. (2 g) baking soda

1 tsp. (4 g) granulated sugar

1/4 tsp. (1.5 g) table salt

1 cup (250 ml) buttermilk

1 stick unsalted butter, very cold

1/4 cup milk (2% or whole)

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt.

Make a well in the dry mixture, then, with a cheese grater in the middle of the well, grate in the frozen butter.

Add a small amount of buttermilk at a time until you get dough that’s slightly sticky and clings to itself. You may not need all of the buttermilk. Gently mix in the buttermilk each time you add it so you don’t overwork your dough.

Flour a cutting board or a clean surface.

Place dough on floured surface. Press and mold dough carefully until it resembles the shape of a rectangle that’s roughly 2 inches thick. Take left third of dough and right third of dough and fold them over until they meet in the middle.

Pat the dough around the edges until you get a shape and thickness similar to your starting rectangle. Then, repeat the process, 3-4 more times, folding both ends together until they meet in the middle. This will help you get tall, flaky biscuits! Flour the dough and surface if the dough starts to becomes too sticky to work with.

Grab a biscuit cutter (I use the rim of a wine glass!) and place it straight down into the biscuit dough until it touches the cutting board, then twist to pop out the biscuit.

Place biscuit on a greased cookie sheet or a 9x9 round cake pan (this is my preferred method because the biscuits won’t have any room to spread, so they will be nice and tall when they come out of the oven. Keep using the wine glass to pop out more biscuits. If necessary, roll the dough back up with a touch of flour and gently flatten with your hands to get more biscuits. You should end up with about 6-7 biscuits from this batch of dough.

Place formed biscuits in the refrigerator for 15 minutes.

Before baking, brush the tops of biscuits with the 1/4 cup reserved milk. This will give them an evenly browned crust. Bake biscuits for 15-20 minutes or until you see that the tops are slightly browned.

Enjoy!