Recipe: Easy homemade buttermilk biscuits
My first memories of biscuits were the kind you find in the frozen aisle at the grocery store, hugging a sad piece of shriveled sausage and suffocating inside cellophane. My mama bought boxes of these and would instruct me to microwave one every morning for breakfast. It was so dry and boring—oh, how I wished there was a little egg or slice of American cheese tucked in there to give it a little lube.Then I moved on to better biscuits—the ones that come as part of a fried chicken family meal from Popeye’s or Church’s—and these were okay, but I either passed right over them and went straight for the dirty rice and mashed potatoes, or I had to drown them in packets of honey before ingesting. I wasn’t sad eating them, like I had been with the frozen breakfast sausage sandwiches of yesteryear, but I wasn’t happy either.Then I learned how to make biscuits myself, and the biscuit game was never the same.After my biscuit-heavy dinner at Tupelo Honey Cafe in Knoxville, Tennessee, I’m going to convince you that homemade, scratchmade biscuits are the way to go. Sure, when in a pinch, you can reach for that blue pressure-packed canister in the frozen aisle, but buttermilk biscuits are really not that hard to DIY.Since biscuits use baking powder instead of yeast, you don’t have to wait hours for the dough to rise. Biscuits should be flaky (not chewy), which means the colder the butter, the better, so no waiting around for the butter to warm up to room temp (more on this in a sec). Also because of this desired flakiness, you want to handle the dough as little as possible to prevent gluten build-up (the opposite of what you’d want with bread), so no need to knead until your arms ache. All this means you can have your biscuits shaped and ready to go into the oven in about half an hour, and warm ready-to-eat biscuits in about 45 minutes.A little side note about flaky biscuits: I’m no scientist, so I’ll keep the explanation simple. Gluten is a protein network present in grains like wheat (and thus flour), and builds up when water is introduced. Gluten is what makes the dough elastic and the resulting baked good chewy. This is what you want in a bread, but not in pastries that are supposed to be flaky, e.g. Pie crusts, croissants, and biscuits. So to minimize the amount of gluten in your biscuit dough, you want to keep everything cold for as long as possible so they don’t melt, i.e. Liquefy, and increase in gluten. Okay, that’s the extent of my science lesson.You can eat them with a spoonful of honey or jam, or go a little further and make biscuits ’n gravy (saving this recipe for another time) or a strawberry shortcake (did you know that the “shortcake” in strawberry shortcake is essentially a biscuit?). I made a strawberry shortcake on both “MasterChef” and Four Senses, and it just involves baking the biscuit, slicing it in half crosswise, adding some macerated strawberries and chantilly cream. It’s a very simple southern American dessert. Maybe I’ll post the recipe another time.You could also turn the biscuits into breakfast sandwiches, which will definitely be tastier than the ones I ate in elementary school—make them in bulk ahead of time, wrap in parchment or foil, and freeze for a grab-on-the-go snack.As with my Vietnamese fish dipping sauce, once you know this recipe, you’ll open so many new doors. What I’m trying to say is, get on these biscuits already!We’re going to use metric measurements here since it allows for more precision, and baking is, well, precise. For the most accuracy, use a food scale.