Southern-Style Buttermilk Biscuits

Southern biscuits are the perfect fictional device for telling the narratives of Southern families. One cook makes his biscuits with White Lily flour only because that’s how his Maw Mae did it. Another swears by lard, as her family never had the funds for high-dollar butter or shortening. Most Southern cooks bake biscuits at least once a week — a ritual and rite of passage as the recipe is handed down through the generations.

My biscuit recipe is much the same. As a transplant to the South, and married into a Southern family, I felt a steep sense of duty in making the perfect Southern biscuit. Truth be told, I don’t think I’ll ever truly master it, but 10 years after taking biscuits to task, I’ve landed on a reliable recipe that I can replicate here in the South or anywhere else in the country with ease. My biggest piece of advice: Don’t take biscuit-making too seriously, but try to make them regularly. The ingredients are relatively inexpensive and the results are always edible, despite any mishandling.

• They’re tender and flaky. These Southern-style biscuits walk the line of being both tender AND flaky.
• They’re light, yet sturdy. The biscuits are also sturdy enough for breakfast sandwiches or for dunking into soup.

The terms “tender” and “flaky” are often used together to describe baked goods like pie dough and biscuits (although very few biscuits are both). Here are the key differences.

• Tender biscuits: Tender describes a small tight crumb, similar to a muffin. A tender biscuit requires a relatively wet dough that can be hard to knead, so much so that tender biscuits are almost exclusively drop biscuits.
• Flaky biscuits: Flaky biscuits, on the other hand, bring to mind the biscuits from a can that can be peeled apart into distinct layers. Homemade flaky biscuits are folded onto themselves repeatedly until the layers are developed, making them decidedly tougher than tender biscuits.

The best Southern-style biscuits are both tender AND flaky, using a combination of techniques and ingredients like buttermilk. Buttermilk is commonly used in Southern-style biscuits for its tangy flavor, plus buttermilk helps biscuits rise when paired with baking soda.

In the past, I relied on the recipe on the back of the bag of White Lily self-rising flour. It felt like a cheat at first, but I started to learn that biscuit-making was much less a recipe than a technique, and a practice in balancing being both gentle with the dough, yet working it enough to get a high rise and a few flaky layers.

Now that I’ve got the technique down, I’ve moved away from using White Lily self-rising flour and mostly keep King Arthur all-purpose flour on hand for baking. I think my biscuits are better with an everyday all-purpose flour plus leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda.

• All-purpose flour: Use the all-purpose flour you have on hand.
• Baking powder and baking soda: These are the leavening agents that make the biscuits light.
• Unsalted butter: Freeze the butter beforehand so that you can grate it easily.
• Buttermilk: The baking soda reacts with the acid in buttermilk to help the biscuits rise.

1. Heat the oven. Arrange a rack in the middle of the oven and heat to 450°F.
2. Mix the dry ingredients. Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a medium bowl.
3. Grate the butter. Grate the frozen butter on the large holes of a box grater.
4. Add the butter to the dry ingredients. Use your fingers to sift the butter into the flour and break up any clumps of grated butter.
5. Mix in the buttermilk. Pour in the buttermilk and beat it in with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl.
6. Fold the biscuits. Pat the dough into a 1-inch-thick rough rectangle. Fold the dough in half from top to bottom, then pat it back down into its original shape. Repeat with the folding and patting, alternating folding from each side, the bottom, and the top until you have completed a total of 8 folds.
7. Cut the biscuits. Pat the dough into a 1-inch thickness, then use a 3-inch round cutter to cut the dough into 6 biscuits.
8. Bake. Arrange the biscuits in a cast iron skillet so that the biscuits touch each other, but not the sides of the pan. Bake at 500°F until golden-brown.

I moved from the South straight from culinary school and mistakenly thought I had learned everything I needed to know about biscuit-making there. I had come to Atlanta to work as an intern on Alton Brown’s Good Eats, and was immediately set to task making prop food with the rest of the team for an episode on substitutions, including biscuits. My biscuits were wonky despite following Alton’s recipe and following the rules I had learned in culinary school. I had worked the dough too much in trying to master it.

What followed were several years of too-tender biscuits, as I tried a new recipe and a new technique every weekend. I picked up a tip on grating the butter from an old Chow.com recipe for cheddar cheese biscuits. I tried to stick with Southern flours that are made from softer wheat and intended to make a more tender biscuit. I learned to bake my biscuits in a cast iron pan for a crisper crust from my friend Erika (a biscuit whisperer of the highest ilk). I tried cornmeal biscuits and yogurt biscuits, I swapped whole wheat for the white flour.

The recipe below gives a nod to each of the people who taught me about biscuit-making and shared their stories with me.

These tender and flaky biscuits are perfectly delicious on their own while still warm from the oven. They also pair well with a number of dishes. Serve the biscuits for breakfast, lunch, or dinner with these tasty recipes.

• Southern Sausage Gravy
• Brown Butter Soft Scrambled Eggs
• Classic White Gravy
• Breakfast Meatballs
• Sunny-Side-Up Eggs
• Perfect Bacon in the Oven
• Creamed Spinach Scrambled Eggs
• Shrimp and Grits
• Crispy, Juicy Fried Chicken
• Blackened Catfish and Smoked Gouda Grits
• Southern Chicken Fried Steak with Gravy

• Storage: Leftover biscuits can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
• Reheat: Warm in a low oven or toast in a toaster oven.