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biscuits

The best southern buttermilk biscuits I know how to make

Makes 15-18 biscuits

Ingredients

  • 3/4 Cup (6oz) buttermilk, chilled
  • 3/4 Cup (6oz) sour cream, chilled
  • 3 Cups (375g) flour†, plus some for rolling out
  • 2 Tbsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 6 Tbsp butter
  • 3 Tbsp shortening

† Use soft southern wheat flour (White Lily), or 4 parts all purpose to 1 part cake flour (300g:75g)

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 425°F.

  • Whisk buttermilk and sour cream in a measuring cup until homogenous.

  • In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Using a pastry cutter (or spoon, or your fingers), work butter and shortening into dry ingredients until mixture resembles bread crumbs or cornmeal. Add wet mixture, and stir with a fork until just combined.

  • Turn dough onto floured surface, and gently pat out into a 1-inch thick round. Cut out biscuits with a floured 2 1/2-inch cutter (or the rim of a cup) - push down all the way and twist. Place biscuits on baking sheet so that they are not touching. Reform scrap dough, working it as little as possible, and continue cutting.

  • Push biscuits down slightly in the center with your thumb (to get an even rise). Bake until biscuits are tall and light gold on top, about 15 minutes. Optionally brush tops with melted butter.

Notes

I started out with using Alton Brown's recipe, and used tips from the white lily flour recipe.

It turns out that the video linked from Alton's recipe has more detail, and is a bit different. I incorporated some suggestions from that as well.

That video clip comes from Good Eats S1 E7, "The Dough Also Rises", but it is edited from the original. Some notes from the full episode:

  • using a mix of shortening and butter, for tenderness and flavor
  • you're looking for a very wet dough, if it looks sticky and nasty you're on the right track
  • use a heavy duty half-sheet aluminum baking pan, which won't burn biscuit bottoms like non-stick or dark pans
  • biscuits get volume from steam and the CO2 from the chemical leaveners - acid + alkaline = gas, and double-acting baking powder has both, so it reacts once when wet, then again when hot
  • a lot of ingredients throw off the balance, so we add baking soda to counteract the added acidity

I added some extra fat, but the biscuits spread too much, so I incorporated some ideas from The Food Lab Buttermilk Biscuits

  • use 1/2 buttermilk, 1/2 sour cream
  • fold dough together with a spatula

One thing I don't do is laminate the dough like in that recipe. To me, biscuits are a quick bread, not a pastry. That's too much like making rough puff.

At this point, the biscuits don't rise as much as I would like, so I will incorporate some extra baking powder and see how that goes.

I 1.5x-ed the recipe since it's nice to have some of these left over.

I've seen some other recipes that advise freezing the butter for a bit then grating it, like this one, but it doesn't come out any different when I've tried that. And it just gets more things dirty.