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buttery buttermilk biscuits

Buttermilk 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. My recipe was inspired by “Fluffy Buttermilk Biscuits” in The Perfect Recipe by Pam Anderson, among the most used cookbooks in my collection. 
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Prep Time 15 minutes
Total Time 32 minutes

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

Instructions
 

  • 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

  1. Folding the dough (step 3) encourages some flakiness, but no worries if you omit this step. Just skip folding if it seems fiddly.
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. I use Morton® coarse kosher salt.