Light and Fluffy Homemade Biscuits

For all the things I learned to cook at a young age, homemade biscuits was one dish that always failed me.  Always.

One perfect easy-open biscuit with homemade breakfast sausage patty.

My mom made them, but sometimes even hers turned out flat.  Sorry, Mom.

A few years ago, a found a few posts about White Lily flour biscuits. “How amazingly light and fluffy these biscuits were!”, they said.  I thought to myself, must be too good to be true.  So, I went across the street to my neighbor’s, because she does make good biscuits from scratch.  And guess what she uses?  White Lily flour.  Enough.

On my next trip to the store I made sure to pick up a bag of White Lily flour, and a quart of buttermilk.  You can use regular milk successfully, but I wanted a NO-FAIL recipe to make up for the years of hockey puck biscuits that went into the garbage.  The buttermilk reacts with the baking soda, acting as a leavener in addition to the steam.

Another trick I’ve learned over the years is to use frozen butter and grate it into the flour.  The result is a perfect distribution of grain-size pieces of butter.  I use salted butter, but unsalted is fine, too.

A little bit of kneading is required to bring the dough together.  Make sure to do some layered folding to ensure a flaky biscuit.

Here is the recipe according to the recipe on the back of the bag of self-rising flour:

• 2 cups self-rising flour
• 3/4 cups buttermilk
• 1/4 cupfrozen butter or crisco

Assemble your ingredients.  I alwasy keep my extra butter in the freezer, so, I just grab a stick out of there.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Three basic ingredients: buttermilk, flour, and butter.

Grate the frozen butter into the flour.

Grate the frozen butter into the flour.

Using your fingers or a wooden spoon, lightly mix the butter and flour.

Butter and flour.

Add the buttermilk and use a wooden spoon to mix well. Add a little more flour if needed.

Pulling the dough together with a wooden spoon to prevent the butter from melting.

Sprinkle some flour on your board and dump out dough. Sprinkle with a few drops of buttermilk if there are a few crumbs that need to be worked in.

Ready to be gently kneaded into flaky layers.

Knead a few times by folding and turning yo bring the dough together.

Use a rolling pin or pat out to about 1/2 inch thick.  I prefer to make square biscuits, just because it’s easier and there is no need to roll out the scraps to make the last few biscuits, which are always tougher than the original.  There are no scraps with square biscuits.  Or you can make circles. To make the fold-over, easy open biscuits, roll or pat out the dough into a rectangle.  Cut 8 to 10 rectangles, and fold the rectangles over into squares,  gently pressing them to keep them from popping open.

Bake at 450 degrees for about 16 minutes.

Biscuits fresh from the oven.

Our favorite biscuit opens easily to perfectly hold one yummy homemade sausage patty.  It was one of the rectangular biscuits that I folded over, just to see how it turns out.  Turned out the best!

Or, make a breakfast platter with a perfectly fried yard egg and some sauteed baby spinach, topped off with some old-fashioned whole fig preserves.

Buen provecho.

NOTE:  I’ve always wanted to try freezing the unbaked biscuits, so I can pull out just a few, like the frozen ones in the store.  I haven’t tried it yet, but if anyone out there has, let me know how they baked up.