There was a time in my life where I prioritized obtaining drugs over most other things.

That included food, and so for a while my diet consisted primarily of an odd bread substitute that I made myself.  The recipe was just flour (cheap) and water (free), which I mixed together in haphazard ratios, rolled flat on a baking pan, and baked until it was brown. It tasted, as you might expect, pretty terrible. I spread honey and butter when I could afford them on the faux-bread to try to improve the situation, which was the culinary equivalent of trying to make a turd smell better by dropping a rose on top of it. Beyond not tasting great, It was not particularly filling - I remember thinking that this was not unlike the food I imagine medieval prisoners eating. It felt like an apt punishment for the lifestyle I had created for myself.

I have slowly moved past being angry at myself for that lifestyle, in the way each of us must grapple with our own youthful indiscretions. I remain furious, however, that I didn’t spend five minutes googling “how to make bread without yeast” or at a bare minimum “flour and water bread,” both of which would have yielded plentiful results for how to properly cultivate a loaf of sourdough. I definitely had the internet, and more than enough time to devote entire days to the cultivation of wild yeast, and yet I continually gnawed at this pitiful pita substitute for months and months.

I found my way to this new and wonderful version of my life by learning to love myself. I learned to love myself by learning to accept the love of my friends and family.  Cooking for people, even something as small and simple as a biscuit, continues the grand traditions of community and togetherness that gathering around a table to eat has always signified.

All of this is a long way of saying that simple ingredients can be incredibly delicious if cultivated properly. Nowhere is that more evident than in bread, and more specifically in buttermilk biscuits, which in my humble opinion are the pinnacle of American bread tradition. I’ve never had a good buttermilk biscuit that needed more than eight ingredients, and I’m going to argue below that you really only need five. I love buttermilk biscuits because they are easy to make and hard to make well.  I love them because you can taste the love that goes into a good one.  I love them because you can’t mass produce good ones, no matter what those mad scientists at Pillsbury might tell you. They represent the sort of flourish on a meal that I fall head over heels for.

My buttermilk biscuit recipe is not a family recipe, as so many are.  Rather, it’s an amalgamation of Sean Brock’s, Alton Brown’s, Dan Delaney’s, and my own experimentation. I didn’t grow up with may family recipes, which I sometimes feel a bit sad about, but in the case of biscuits, I really think the trick is making a few recipes that you find, figuring out which feels the best to you and making it your own.

Buttermilk Biscuits

Ingredients

  • 4 cups White Lily self-rising flour*
  • 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
  • 1 stick (8 Tbsp) Unsalted Butter, as cold as possible
  • 1 Tbsp. Granulated sugar
  • 2 tsp. Baking Powder
*You can substitute the white lily flour for 3.5 cups all purpose flour + 3 tablespoons baking powder and ½ teaspoon baking soda

Procedure

It is essential as you go through this process that the butter remain as cold as possible until it goes in the oven.  Handle the dough as little as possible, and refridgerate the dough if you fear the butter is in danger of melting completely.
  1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
  2. Sift the flour, sugar, and baking powder into a large mixing bowl.
  3. Chop the butter into small pieces.  Add the butter into the dry ingredients, smushing it into smaller pieces with your fingers as you coat them in the flour mix. The pieces of butter should end up about the size of a pea. Add a big pinch of salt and black pepper.
  4. Make a well in the center of the butter/flour mix and add the buttermilk. Using your hands or a spatula, mix the flour into the buttermilk. Depending on how thick the buttermilk is, you may have to add more buttermilk or flour.
  5. Once the dough is just combined, powder a cutting board with flour and dump out the dough. It should fall out in one mass.
  6. Knead gently, adding flour to the board as needed. Roll the dough out to about ½ inch thick. Cut the dough in half, place one half on top of the other, and roll out again.  Repeat this process 3 times.  On the third time, gently pat out the dough to approximately 1 inch thick.
  7. Butter your baking pan. Punch out the biscuits with a ring mold or thin-lipped cup coated in flour. The biscuits should barely touch on the pan and be roughly ½ inch apart from each other.
  8. Spread a tiny bit of melted butter on top of the biscuits. Cook in the oven at 425 degrees for 15 minutes or until golden brown on top.

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