Recipe Revisit: Buttermilk Biscuits

This wonderful recipe for basic buttermilk biscuits, my interpretation of Harry’s grandmother’s southern recipe, is still just about the only biscuit recipe that matters to me. I recently made it into smaller biscuits to feed a crowd (a large enough crowd to make my house feel pretty “cozy”). They were presented as accompaniments to pots of hot soup on a frigid early January night, and it seemed that they were gone in seconds. Success!

But as I was baking them, I noticed that it was taking significantly longer to properly cook them than had been indicated in the recipe I posted years ago. I had apparently adjusted baking times as needed without really thinking about it, waiting to pull the biscuits out of the oven until I knew they were good and done. I can’t think of anything more annoying to a recipe reader than secret instructions. A quick re-visit was in order.

The concocting portion of the recipe needs no revision, although I do think that kneading the dough more deliberately, if still gently, makes it easier to work with when it comes to cutting out the biscuits. It does take more time for the biscuits to get to the desired just-beginning-to-brown stage than what is stated the original post (and possibly the original handed-down recipe. I can’t remember.) I simply increased that time in the instructions below. It’s still best, as always, to prepare to exercise your own judgement, a skill that is essential in the making of a good baker. The biscuits will be done when they are done, and oven temperatures can vary across households.

While this biscuit batch is for about twelve 2 ½ to 3-inch biscuits, you can use this recipe for more, smaller biscuits with good results. It’s likely that the baking time will be slightly shorter for smaller biscuits.

I still think there are ways this can be varied to include whole grains or more flavors, and I did do such a thing with this cinnamon raisin version. Southern-style white flour buttermilk biscuits are classic, however, and their charm would become more elusive with unnecessary changes or additions. As they are, they’re simple, quick to throw together, satisfying on their own with butter or jam or ham and cheese, and great accompaniments to so many things.

Grandmama’s Buttermilk Biscuits

3 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon fine salt
5 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup cold butter (1 stick)
1 ½ cups cultured buttermilk

1. Preheat oven to 450 F. In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda. Sift or whisk together to combine.

2. Cut the butter into small chunks. With a pastry blender, knives or your hands, cut or work the butter into the flour mixture until it is well-distributed and the butter pieces are smaller than peas and coated with flour. (I usually end up using my hands.)

3. Add the buttermilk and stir gently until all of the flour mixture is moistened. Add a little more buttermilk if the mixture is too dry.

4. Turn the dough out onto a well floured surface. Gently knead the dough a few times and shape it into a rough disk. Gently pat the disk out to about 1 inch thick, dusting the flour as needed to keep the dough from sticking. Cut the dough into about 12 biscuits with a round cutter or an inverted glass. (I used a 2 ½-inch biscuit cutter.) Place the cut biscuits on a baking sheet. (I line my baking sheet with a silicone baking mat.)

5. Bake at 450 F for 15-18 minutes or until just beginning to brown. Serve as soon as they are cool enough to eat. Leftovers are nice when warmed in the microwave. The biscuits also freeze well.

Makes about 1 dozen biscuits.

Other recipes like this one: Barley Flour Scones, Cheddar Jalapeno Scones, Cinnamon Raisin Buttermilk Biscuits

Cinnamon Raisin Biscuits

I know I shouldn’t mess with something great. Take Grandmama’s Biscuits, for instance. What kind of fool would dare to fiddle with this level of perfection. Well, I did. I turned beautiful buttermilk biscuits in to a slightly sweet cinnamon-y breakfast (or afternoon, or whenever) little confection.

This is just a simple variation on basic biscuits. All I did was add the classic combination of cinnamon and raisins, lightly sweetened with just a bit of sugar, to my favorite biscuit recipe. They’re as simple to make as any biscuits and benefit from the same kind of care, such as gentle handling of the dough (you don’t need to really knead), and baking until just a bit golden.

 

We ate these for breakfast all on their own, but you could slather them with butter (especially while they’re still warm) or top them with jam or honey. They might not even be bad split in half and served with some kind of apple compote, shortcake style. Like any other biscuit, these are best eaten fresh, even still warm from the oven, but I’ve found these to be just dandy out of the freezer and re-warmed in the microwave.

Maybe it is foolish to mess around with a practically perfect recipe, but, since I wasn’t trying to improve, just expand, I granted myself justification to add a little flavor to my buttermilk biscuits. And I didn’t let myself down. These gently spiced and sweetened biscuits are delicious and just different enough to provide a little weekend breakfast novelty. Of course, if I hadn’t had such a good recipe to build on, who knows what might have happened. I shudder to even think about it.

 

Cinnamon Raisin Buttermilk Biscuits

3 cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon
5 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup cold butter
1 cup raisins
1 ½ cups buttermilk

1. Preheat oven to 450 F. In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, sugar, cinnamon, baking powder and baking soda. Sift or whisk together to combine.

2. Cut the butter into small chunks. With a pastry blender or knives, cut the butter into the flour mixture until it is well-distributed and the butter pieces are smaller than peas and coated with flour. (I usually end up using my hands to work in the butter satisfactorily.)

3. Stir in the raisins. Add the buttermilk and stir gently until all of the flour mixture is moistened. Gently knead in the bowl a few times to get the dough to come together and incorporate all the buttermilk. Add a little more buttermilk if the mixture is too dry to come together.

4. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and gently pat it out to about 1 inch thick. Cut the dough into about 12 to 15 biscuits with a round cutter or an inverted glass. (I used a 2 ½-inch biscuit cutter.) Place the cut biscuits on a baking sheet. (I line my baking sheet with a silicone baking mat.)

5. Bake at 450 F for 10 minutes or until just beginning to brown. Serve as soon as they are cool enough to eat. Leftovers are nice when warmed in the microwave. The biscuits also freeze well.

Makes about 12-15 biscuits.

Other recipes like this one: Grandmama’s Buttermilk Biscuits, Cranberry Orange Oatmeal Scones

One year ago: Cranberry Orange Oatmeal Scones (probably not a coincidence)

 

Grandmama's Biscuits

**Note: This recipe has been updated and, hopefully, improved in a new post, here.

Much like Harry’s grandmother’s pumpkin pie recipe, her buttermilk biscuit recipe is perfectly delicious. It’s old-fashioned and unpretentious and leaves me with little desire to try any other biscuit recipes.

I thought I would have so much to say about Grandmama’s biscuits when I finally got around to posting their recipe to The Messy Apron. The words I can come up with just aren’t enough, though. Even the thousands of words painted by these mediocre photos fall short. No, I would have to make these biscuits and feed them to you while they’re warm, the aroma of their baking still floating gently in the air, for me to get my point across. I really, really wish I could do that.

I don’t know what makes these biscuits special. I suppose in a bygone era, they weren’t special, just the food that someone who loved you made on a regular basis, the food that you didn’t even know was an endangered species of sorts, doomed to fall to whole grains and omega-3 fatty acids. But special they are now, special enough to make only once in a while so their fluffy, refined flour and copious amount of butter don’t completely annihilate our higher WFQ* lifestyles.

Much like with a decadent dessert, the deviation from a high WFQ is totally worth it when it comes to these biscuits. They’re soft, layered, flaky and buttery. They’re slightly tangy from the buttermilk, sufficiently neutral to accompany just about anything, just as a good biscuit should. I recently baked them to serve alongside this stew and was reminded just how wonderful they are, just how perfect Grandmama’s baking must have been.

Okay, may lightning strike me down, but I did change one thing, kind of a big thing, in Grandmama’s recipe. The original called for “yellow Crisco,” which I never have on hand, so I use butter. I’m sure that back before shortening was believed to be the cheap and easy (and, erroneously, healthier) alternative, butter would have been the preferred fat for homemade biscuits. Either that or lard, and I never have lard around either. Anyway, the butter is great and I won’t apologize for using it.

These biscuits are best served shortly after they come out of the oven, but they’re fine the next day after a bit of refreshing in the microwave. I rarely serve stews without them and they’re quite nice with a bit of jam the next morning (if you can manage to keep from eating them all right away.) They’re also not too shabby as the base for strawberry shortcake. Well, I just made myself hungry for biscuits all over again, and wish I had enough buttermilk left to make more. Then I’d have you over for a snack and you could get a genuine appreciation of what I’m trying to tell you about how great Grandmama’s biscuits are!

* WFQ: Whole Food Quotient

Grandmama’s Buttermilk Biscuits

3 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon fine salt
5 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup cold butter (1 stick)
1 ½ cups cultured buttermilk

1. Preheat oven to 450 F. In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda. Sift or whisk together to combine.

2. Cut the butter into small chunks. With a pastry blender or knives, cut the butter into the flour mixture until it is well-distributed and the butter pieces are smaller than peas and coated with flour. (I usually end up using my hands to work in the butter satisfactorily.)

3. Add the buttermilk and stir gently until all of the flour mixture is moistened. Gently knead in the bowl a few times to get the dough to come together and incorporate all the buttermilk.

4. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and gently pat it out to about 1 inch thick. Cut the dough into about 12 biscuits with a round cutter or an inverted glass. (I used a 2 ½-inch biscuit cutter.) Place the cut biscuits on a baking sheet. (I line my baking sheet with a silicone baking mat.)

5. Bake at 450 F for 10 minutes or until just beginning to brown. Serve as soon as they are cool enough to eat. Leftovers are nice when warmed in the microwave. The biscuits also freeze well.

Makes about 1 dozen biscuits.

Other recipes like this one: Sour Cream Drop Biscuits with Lemon and Thyme (flavorful, but not as good as Grandmama’s), Spinach and Feta Scones with Dill

One year ago: Hummus

Patio Herbs

I began to fully understand how the term “container garden” came to be in use, when I started thinking about writing to tell you about my “pot garden.” I might eat granola and have a slightly more laid-back lifestyle than is in vogue these days, but if you really know me, you know that really is oregano growing on my porch. To keep myself out of trouble, I’ll try to refer to my stash of culinary herbs on the back patio as a container garden or patio or porch garden (although I might become more google-able if I use the word “pot”).

Anyway, the herbs are growing, and only a few need to be transplanted to larger pots. (I had to buy some more potting soil…don’t you just hate buying dirt?) I should be able to supplement my dishes quite favorably (or flavorably) all summer. I have the “Scarborough Fair” quartet (parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme), oregano, four kinds of mint (spearmint, peppermint, orange, and chocolate), dill, tarragon, and summer savory, something new to my cooking that goes well with tomatoes and green beans. I also have a spicy salad greens mix just coming up from seed, and I planted two kinds of basil seeds that were pretty old, and I don’t know if they’ll come up.

I bought most of the herbs as plants from garden centers, but a few are leftovers from last year that I managed to keep alive over the winter. The oregano has actually survived two winters, at least. In magazines and such, they’ll tell you that you can keep a fresh herb garden at a sunny window all winter, but I think those bits of advice were written from places where the angle of the sun is higher in the winter than it is here in southeastern Minnesota. I can keep some things from dying during the cold months, but nothing really grows.

The thyme plants I bought were very well developed and there’s a lot that’s ready to eat, so, to celebrate my porch’s bounty, I used thyme to flavor some quick and easy drop biscuits. I didn’t have buttermilk or yogurt in the house, so I tried sour cream to make these (I had juuuuuust enough), with good results. We enjoyed these biscuits with scrambled eggs with more fresh herbs and cheese for Sunday brunch.

You could use knives or even your fingers to cut the butter into the flour mixture for these biscuits (or anything else that uses a similar procedure), but I really like using a pastry blender. The one I like is in the photo below, and has blades rather than thick wires as I have seen in other models. I also strongly recommend a Microplane grater for removing lemon zest. It takes off just the nice fragrant, flavorful yellow part, leaving the bitter pith behind. (I used my kitchen shears to harvest the thyme and the whisk to stir the flour mixture, so they got in the shot too.)

The dough for these biscuits is quite wet, but results in a nice crust and moist interior. They can be simply dropped onto a baking pan rather than rolled and cut.


Sour Cream Drop Biscuits with Lemon and Thyme
adapted from Cooking Pleasures magazine

1 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small cubes
½ cup sour cream
¼ cup milk
zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon lemon juice
3 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves

Preheat oven to 425 F.
1. Place flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Stir well with a whisk. Add butter and cut in with a pastry blender until the butter is well-distributed and the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

2. Mix the sour cream, milk and lemon juice together in a measuring cup or small bowl. Add to the flour mixture. Add thyme leaves. Stir gently just until the mixture is no longer dry. Do not beat or overmix.

3. Scoop out dough in equal portions and place on a baking sheet that has been greased, or lined with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. I made large biscuits and got 5 out of the dough.

4. Bake at 425 for 12-15 minutes or until the outside of the biscuit is beginning to brown. Cool slightly before consuming. These are best right away, but are just fine later, and can be frozen as well.

Makes 5-6 large biscuits