As a southern girl, I grew up eating biscuits. They’re a breakfast staple! And though I may enjoy the flavor of biscuits from a can as much as the next gal, they never do quite measure up to fluffy, homemade, flaky biscuits. However! The biscuit gods have made it less than pleasant for us little cooks to make said fluffy masterpieces. In particular, I happen to despise using a pastry cutter to “cut” in the butter…
And then Alton Brown showed me the light. I love Alton Brown.
Not more than my husband of course…
moving on.
Lets gather our family of friendly ingredients!
Including: Shortening, baking powder, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, flour, and *not pictured* butter.
And….your food processor! That’s right baby, we are not breaking a sweat today! Let the food processor do allllll the work.
Go ahead and dump all your dry ingredients into the food processor.
And give them a whirl. Then add your shortening and cold butter. Process until the mixture looks like coarse sand. Like this!
It feels so nice to be cheating the biscuit gods. Alright, now this next part almost ended in disaster for me and my 7 cup food processor. Pour the buttermilk into the work bowl of your processor, and quicker than I did, turn it on to mix it all together. I waited too long to begin the mixing, and consequently, some of the buttermilk leaked out the bottom of my bowl…thankfully, my cheater machine and I are both still functioning mostly perfect. Anways…mix all the ingredients until it looks something like this.
Turn your dough out onto a floured surface.
Gently fold the dough over onto itself and knead for about 30 seconds, just until the dough is smooth.
Roll out your dough…
And grab your biscuit cutter…or the top of a ball jar lid if you’re me and don’t have any biscuit cutters…or cookie cutters that aren’t Christmas themed.
After you’ve run out of whole biscuits to cut from the dough, gather the pieces, re-roll the dough and cut out as many as you can.
Lay your biscuits on a (preferably aluminum) sheet pan, lightly press a shallow dent into the top of each biscuit to help the tops stay flat.
After you bake these babies you would not believe what comes out of the oven…
Sky high and fluffy biscuits! I slathered on sausage gravy with fresh pork sausage I got this weekend from my coop.
*sigh* These are inexplicably perfect.
Perfect Biscuits
Adapted from Alton Brown’s Southern Biscuits recipe in Good Eats: The Early Years
2 2/3 cups Flour
4 teaspoons Baking Powder
1/4 teaspoon Baking Soda
3/4 teaspoon Kosher Salt
2 tablespoons Unsalted Butter, chilled
1/4 cup Shortening, chilled
1 cup Buttermilk, chilled
Directions
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Add all dry ingredients to the work bowl of a food processor with the dough blade attached. Pulse three times to mix together.
Place butter and shortening in work bowl and mix until it resembled coarse sand. Add buttermilk and mix until dough comes together.
Dump dough onto a floured surface and fold dough over onto itself, kneading it until it gets soft. Do not knead for over a minute or the heat of your hands will cause the dough to become too soft.
Roll dough out to 1/2 to 1 inch thick and press into 3 inch rounds. Place rounds onto sheet pan and bake until biscuits are a light gold on top, 15 to 20 minutes.
Eat and enjoy!
Eat well and love much you beautiful people,
Cheater Sarah
[…] not so deft hand with the cookie cutter and I think I over kneaded the dough. I saw two tutorials here and here, but too bad that I saw them after making my biscuits. But I think I got the drift now, […]