Butter My Biscuits

I am not going to lie, January is kind of kicking our butts so far. Between illness and first semester finals, we have been riding the struggle bus. In fact, I attempted a completely different meal for this blog and it went awry, so I resorted to some good ol’ comfort food.

Believe it or not, I have never actually made biscuits from scratch, but we love them, so I thought I would give it a whirl. This is one of those recipes that every respectable Southern cook has in their arsenal. If you look for a recipe online, you will find a million and two.

Most recipes start with the same ingredients, flour, butter, and buttermilk. All recipes call for COLD butter, some cut it in with a food processor or a pastry blender. Some recipes, like the one I used, call for grated butter.

So, why the cold butter? When butter is baked in a hot oven, it creates steam. So those little bits of cold butter, dispersed throughout the dough, melt, creating steam pockets, which leads to a flaky biscuit. Magic.

I used a recipe I found on www.damndelicious.com. She uses frozen butter that you grate with a cheese grater. It mixes in quite nicely and is not so labor-intensive as using a pastry cutter to chop up the butter.

I also chose her recipe because I wanted to bake them in my cast iron skillet rather than just a baking pan. You can make the same recipe with a baking pan, but using cast iron creates a delicious crispy bottom. If you don’t have a cast iron skillet, you can find one on Amazon.

Cast iron retains heat evenly, so your biscuits get a crispy crust but stay tender on the inside. If your pan is already seasoned, you simply need to rub a thin layer of vegetable oil into the pan with a cloth. Your biscuits will pop out of the pan beautifully after baking.

One note on baking with cast iron – it gets REALLY hot, so you need a good sturdy mitt to pull out the hot and heavy pan from the oven. I have a nice long sleeved oven mitt from Cuisinart that is perfect for just such a thing. You can find a set for yourself here.

Mixing up the dough is really quite simple. To keep your biscuits nice and tender, you need to take care to not over-handle the dough. After you have mixed in the buttermilk, the dough is a bit crumbly. At this point, you can dump it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it just enough to combine all the crumbs into a nice soft dough.

You then roll the dough out to about 1/2″ or 1/4″, depending on how thick you like your biscuits. Then you can use a biscuit cutter to cut them out. If you don’t have a biscuit cutter, you can use the metal rim of a mason jar. When cutting out the biscuits, be careful not to twist the cutter. This can flatten the edges and make it so your biscuits don’t rise as nicely.

My cast iron skillet has room for 8 biscuits without overcrowding. The dough makes about 14 biscuits, so I just repeated the baking process again.

They bake in 14-16 minutes. Once you have taken the skillet out of the oven, brush some melted butter on top of each biscuit.

They are, of course, best served warm out of the oven. Slather them with butter and jam, or serve them with your favorite stew. They will also make delicious breakfast sandwiches with eggs and breakfast meat.

If you aren’t eating them immediately, you can also freeze them and pull them out when you need them. Simply allow the biscuits to cool completely, then wrap them in aluminum foil or freezer wrap and store in a freezer bag.

*As an Amazon associate, I earn a small percent of qualifying purchases made from some links in this blog.