Growing up I ate 3 kinds of biscuits.  There were restaurant biscuits, can biscuits, and drop biscuits made from Bisquick.  Drop biscuits are the most nostalgic.  My dad would make drop biscuits occasionally on a Saturday morning.  When they were done he would poke a hole in the biscuit with his finger and fill it with syrup.  Can biscuits were easy.  In the summer I would make and eat an entire can of biscuits.

However, my favorites to eat were probably restaurant biscuits.  They were just big, fluffy, and delicious.

After eating some great biscuits at a southern food restaurant in Nashville over a year ago, Teresa and I started trying to recreate those big, fluffy biscuits.  We have made tons of soda biscuits.  We have made yeast biscuits.  We have made several varieties of drop biscuits.  We have made biscuits and gravy.  But until this week, we have not made anything close to great southern biscuits.

Over the last year we have learned a lot about biscuits.  Here are a few things of those things.

1. You need fresh flour.  We made several batches early on with old flour and they tasted quite bitter.
2. Everyone says you need White Lily flour.  Either we can’t get that here or it is crazy expensive.  This morning we used some bread flour that we bought in a 25 lb. bag at Costco.
3. Real butter is better than margarine.
4. You don’t need a pastry cutter.  Every recipe says to cut the butter into the flour mixture.  We just squish it in with our fingers and that works great.  It might even do a better job.
5. You need to flour the sharp cookie cutter, then press straight down.  If you don’t, you will risk the sides of your biscuits getting pinched together.  Then they won’t rise in the oven very well.
6. You don’t need to take the effort to make yeast biscuits.  They get fluffy, but they taste like yeasty dinner rolls.  While good, they don’t have the flavor of a breakfast biscuit.
7. When the recipe says, “Knead lightly,” what it really means is, “Knead so lightly that you aren’t even sure you should call this kneading.”  This morning I kneaded maybe 5 times.  I barely pressed down and the dough was barely holding together.  (2 questions: What is the past tense of knead? What do you call a single kneading action?)
8. If possible, you want to pull these babies out of the oven the moment they get fully cooked in order to retain some moisture and not be hard on the outside
9. BUTTERMILK! After all of that if you don’t use buttermilk, your biscuits might rise, but they won’t have that wonderfully soft, southern fluffiness.  They will probably seem kind of dry.

So, now that you know all that, here is the recipe we used from Old Fashion Muffin Recipes by Bear Wallow Books Publisher, which you can buy here.

Buttermilk Biscuits
2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 stick butter, chilled
3/4 – 7/8 cup buttermilk (I might have used more like 1 cup)

Sift together the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl.
Cut in butter with knives or pastry blender till mixture resembles coarse meal. (See above for our method of mixing butter and flour mixture.)
Make and indention in center of mixture.
Stir in buttermilk to a soft dough.
Turn out onto a floured bread board and knead lightly a minute.
Roll dough out to 1/2 inch thickness.
Place on ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake at 450 F for 12-15 minutes (We did 12.)

Using the above recipe with the above guidelines we finally got amazing biscuits.  And these kept great.  After two days I threw one of these in the microwave and it was delicious.  Maybe this will help you make great biscuits in less than a year.