Thursday, May 7, 2009

Buttermilk Biscuits


Lordy. These suckers are delicious. The great thing about this recipe is that you can do it entirely in your food processor, if it's big enough (mine is not, and I learned that the hard way). I'm gonna give you the recipe and tell you what I did, and then tell you how I'm gonna do it differently next time.

One cup cake flour
One cup all-purpose flour
Two teaspoons baking POWDER
One teaspoon sugar
Half a teaspoon baking SODA
Half a teaspoon salt
One stick cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
One cup cold buttermilk*

Add all the dry ingredients to a mixing bowl, blender, or food processor. Stir or pulse to mix them. Add in the chopped butter and pulse to combine with the dry stuff. If you're doing it by hand, use a pastry cutter, fork, or a couple of knives to work the butter into the flour. Do this until there are no large lumps of butter and everything looks like crumbs. Add the milk and pulse or stir until the dough starts to clump and everything is thoroughly moistened (I had to use my hands a little).
Preheat the oven to 450F. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and quickly form into a ball. Using a knife or dough cutter, cut the dough in half, in half again, and then cut each fourth into thirds. Form each hunk into a ball and place on an ungreased baking sheet.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Remove and devour.

*If you don't generally use buttermilk, you can make your own with regular milk and lemon juice. Fill your measuring cup to just under the amount you need, then fill in the rest with lemon juice. Let it sit for a minute and give it a good stir, and you're good to go.

Okay, so that's what I did. Here's what I'll do next time (and what you should do the first time):
Double the recipe, first of all. These are delicious and I will eat all of them by myself in one sitting.
Roll the dough out between two sheets of parchment paper, and use a biscuit cutter to make actual biscuits. The ball-shaped biscuits were hard to eat, fell apart at the slightest touch, and burned slightly on the bottom.
Also, I lined my sheet with parchment paper. I won't do that again.

Difficulty: 2.
Makes 12.
Takes half an hour.

2 comments:

Angie said...

Why not use the parchment paper? That's kind of an ominous tip... but now I'm curious.

jessiker said...

I feel like the parchment paper contributed to the burning of the bottoms. Makes more sense to use foil.