Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits

March 25th, 2007 | View Comments

You might have noticed from the content on this blog that I cook, but I don’t really bake (the cookies from Christmas were mostly made by my mom and mostly eaten by me). Part of it is the lack of necessary equipment, like a good mixer and an oven that keeps an even temperature throughout, part of it is that I generally don’t crave baked goods, and part of it is that frankly, the need for precision in baking drives me a little batty.

Add too much of one thing to an entree; you just counter by adding something else. Add too much of another thing to a batter or dough, or undermix or overmix the dough, or beat to medium peaks instead of stiff peaks, or fail to notice that it’s extra-humid so you should adjust the ratio of liquid to flour, and you wind up with brownies that bake up to have the texture and taste of rice cakes or a meringue that runs all over.

Thus, when I have a hankering for fresh chocolate-chip cookies, I usually just buy the scoop-and-bake dough. Quick. Painless. Messless. And delicious.

Biscuits are a different story. I’ve tried the ready-made biscuit dough, gleefully pulling on the paper strip until the can pops satisfyingly, and…that’s about the only thing satisfying about pop-and-bake biscuits. The biscuits are dry and flat, the flavor is flat and overwhelmingly flour-y, and…no. These are not the biscuits I crave, not the biscuits I want to have with fried chicken or with sausage smothered in gravy.

Enter the May Fine Cooking.

The recipe also has the advantage of being basically foolproof* with minimal time and equipment required. You can easily make a dozen biscuits in less than an hour.

On the right we have plain ol’ buttermilk biscuits; on the left are herb-and-cheese biscuits with cheddar, pecorino romano, and chives. I haven’t quite achieved the heights of flakiness in the magazine pictures, but these are still gobble-three-in-five-minutes good.

*Literally, as I was typing this sentence, I discovered that I have been under-salting the biscuit dough, only putting in 1/4 teaspoon instead of the 3/4 teaspoon the recipe calls for. Oops! But you know what? They’re still good.