There are mornings I wake up craving homemade buttery biscuits. I think it’s part sentimental – recalling Bisquick drop biscuits from my childhood, and part sensible – warm bread on the table in little more than 30 minutes. Biscuits can be fussy — rolling, folding, laminating — and those layered beauties really are impressive. But for everyday ease, I use a quick fold and manual shaping. A bit more effort than drop biscuits but the golden squares are a delight. Perfect for breakfast sandwiches, sausage gravy, or a quick snack with a daub of jam.
Buttermilk Biscuits
Makes 9-10 biscuits
This is my go-to biscuit recipe. I’ve always got butter in the freezer at the ready. If there’s no buttermilk in the fridge, I use 1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar stirred into a scant cup of milk. I’ve streamlined the method so there’s no repeated rolling, no hassling with biscuit cutters. I’ve got beautiful buttery biscuits on the table in little more than half an hour. My recipe was inspired by “Fluffy Buttermilk Biscuits” in The Perfect Recipe by Pam Anderson, among the most used cookbooks in my collection.
Ingredients
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp sugar
- ¾ tsp kosher salt
- 6 Tbsp unsalted butter, frozen (or refrigerated works also)
- 1 cup buttermilk (plus extra drops as needed)
Directions
- Adjust oven rack to middle position, preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Use the large holes on a box grater to coarsely grate butter into the dry ingredients, stopping a time or two to toss grated butter into the flour. Give a final stir to evenly distribute butter in dry ingredients.
- Pour in buttermilk and stir until the dough just comes together. If necessary, add extra drops of buttermilk (or milk) and gently mix a bit more as needed.
- Transfer dough onto a floured work surface and pat into a rectangle (roughly 7″ x 10″). Fold one of the short sides of the dough in towards the center. Fold the other short side on top of the first fold as if folding a business letter.
- Gently reshape the dough and pat into square about ½ inch thick. For cleaner edges and better rise, use a sharp knife to trim off the outer perimeter of dough. Then cut the dough into 9 biscuits. Recombine and shape the scraps into an additional biscuit (it won’t be pretty but still tasty).
- Arrange biscuits on baking sheet. Bake until tops are starting to brown and bottoms are golden, about 15 to 17 minutes, internal temperature should register 200 to 205 degrees.
Notes:
- Folding the dough (step 3) encourages some flakiness, but no worries if you omit this step. Just skip folding if it seems fiddly.
- You can skip trimming the outer edge of dough (step 4), but the uncut edges won’t rise as well as the cut edges, resulting in an uneven height.
- Some baking authorities may suggest it’s not always the optimal substitution, but in my experience, vinegar-in-milk works very well in place of buttermilk for this recipe (1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar stirred into a scant cup of milk in place of 1 cup buttermilk).
- I use Morton® coarse kosher salt.
