Kitchen Project #171: American Biscuits
No, they aren't scones. A deep dive by Bronwen Wyatt
Hello,
Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. Thank you so much for being here.
Today I am thrilled because Bronwen Wyatt, is here to take on another american classic - this time, it’s Biscuits. Speaking from the perspective of a British person who has long wished to understand this classic, I’m so grateful to have Bronwen’s guidance. And having baked these now three times, I am a convert. (Firstly just eaten plain, second with a quick salted honey butter, third I made fried egg sandwiches)
On KP+, Bronwen has shared an outstanding variant - fluffy pan biscuits with pimento cheese (or, whatever you like). I fell hard for these and I can’t wait for you to make them. Click here for the recipe.
What’s KP+? Well, it’s the level-up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter (including the commissioning - and fair payment - of all the writers), join a growing community, access extra content (inc., the entire archive) and more. Subscribing is easy and only costs £6 per month or £50 for the whole year. Why not give it a go? Come and join the gang!
Love,
Nicola
American Biscuits
I’ve noticed a trend in American biscuit-making. Chefs are incorporating techniques learned from lamination to create gorgeous, tall, architectural masterpieces. These biscuits are more time consuming, sure, but they reward the baker with layer upon layer of buttery flakes, tender on the inside and shatteringly crisp at the edge. They are totally delicious.-But I would also argue that these are not the biscuits most of us grew up with.
When Nicola asked me if I’d consider developing a biscuit recipe, I knew I had to prepare myself to wade into delicate territory. If you read my piece on cornbread, then you know that traditional Southern bakes spark passionate debate. I also think biscuit-making is the peak example of how a recipe can change over time, and what happens when professional cooking techniques shape our expectations of a recipe.
I’m not here to say that one type of biscuit is better than another, but in developing this recipe I feel like I’ve learned a valuable lesson about the rewards of returning to the lessons of traditional home baking, where speed and simplicity often reign.
But what are American biscuits, anyway?
Backing up - what is a biscuit? The beloved baked good is so familiar to me I nearly forgot that the Brits and Irish have a totally different definition of the word. In the United States, a biscuit is a form of quick bread, a flour-based baked good that gets much of its rise from chemical leaveners. Like a UK-style scone, cold butter is cut into flour and moistened with dairy to form a dough. We typically eat biscuits for breakfast, and they can be sweet or savory (for the sake of brevity, today I’ll be focused on savory biscuits - stay tuned for an upcoming deep dive into sweet biscuits).
Biscuits can be drop-style, where the dough is mixed and then dropped from a spoon or a portion scoop onto a baking tray to form a rustic, free-form mound of dough. Drop-style biscuits typically have a higher hydration and won’t rise as much as a rolled biscuit. Cathead biscuits are an extra-large style of drop biscuit, aptly named because they are the size of a cat’s head. I recently went to a seafood restaurant on New Orleans’ lakefront and was served a cathead biscuit filled with chopped herbs on the side of my plate of stuffed crab. They can also be dropped into simmering chicken stew to make chicken and dumplings. Drop biscuits are often associated with home kitchens in the south because they’re speedy to make and don’t require the mess and fuss of rolling out dough with flour. In more recent years, the beloved North Carolina restaurant group Biscuit Head has introduced this style of biscuit to a broader audience.
Drop biscuits are also the style of biscuit you’d get if you follow the recipe on the back of a box of Bisquick, a widely available baking mix that, like Jiffy, suspends shelf-stable fat into pre-leavened flour. Many of my Southern friends grew up on another convenience product, “whop” biscuits, those infamous tubes of biscuit dough that you crack open by slamming on the side of your countertop. The pressurized cardboard splits upon impact and produces a stack of pre-formed biscuits that bake up in minutes.
Rolled biscuits are more widely known outside of the South, and are probably what most Northerners picture when they think of a biscuit. Just like a scone, these biscuits are rolled, cut, and baked in a hot oven. Angel biscuits, perhaps the least-known biscuit style, are leavened with both yeast and chemical leaveners. Pat-in-the-pan, mile high, or butter swim biscuits are pressed into a baking pan and then scored. These biscuits rise as one large portion of biscuit dough and are pulled apart after baking to reveal tender, flaky sides.
The simplest rolled biscuits are mixed, rolled, cut, and baked in quick succession. Other rolled biscuit recipes incorporate European pastry techniques to roughly laminate the dough, as if you were making a rough puff pastry. This isn’t a true lamination, of course - we’re not enclosing a butter block into the dough to create myriad layers, like in traditional viennoiserie- but it’s inspired by those methods. The iconic chef Cheryl Day of Back in the Day Bakery (now closed) in Georgia takes it a step further, using the fraisage method (found in her book Treasury of Southern Baking), smearing thin sheets of butter throughout the dough with the heel of the hand to create her biscuit layers.
The earliest biscuits were essentially hardtack, perhaps more reminiscent in texture to the crisp cookies we associate with British tea-time biscuits. Over time, southern bakers incorporated fat, typically lard, to tenderize the dough. And just as with cornbread, Southern bakers relied on buttermilk, with its longer shelf life, as the primary dairy in their bakes. When I wrote about cornbread, I talked about how the advent of commercial roller mills and the broader availability of shelf-stable wheat flour, cheaper butter, and chemical leaveners changed the way Southern bakers made their cornbread, shifting away from the unsweetened breads made with 100% cornmeal to something lighter, softer, and more palatable to a modern audience. The same is true for biscuits.
If cornbread was a daily staple, biscuits were the Sunday treat, made as they were with the more expensive 100% wheat flour. In the South, the available flour, milled from soft winter wheat, tended to have a lower protein content than the hard winter wheat grown in the North. The most famous Southern flour, White Lily, became renowned for its ability to produce consistent, tender, fluffy biscuits. White Lily is sold in both plain and self-rising versions, and boasts a 9% protein content. The renowned Virginian chef Edna Lewis, granddaughter of enslaved grandparents, used White Lily flour and lard for her biscuits. She was also famous for preferring to mix her own baking powder from baking soda and cream of tartar, believing store-bought versions were inferior. Another Lewis biscuit innovation lies in her habit of stirring melted butter into the buttermilk for drop biscuits, the melted butter clumping in the cold buttermilk to produce pockets of fat in the dough for an extra-tender crumb.
I know it can feel pedantic to insist on one brand of flour, or one type of flour, over another, especially when there is so much regional (and international) variation on the availability of certain flours. But after making my first batch of biscuits with White Lily, I understood why it had become the gold standard biscuit flour for so many Southern bakers. Luckily you can still make an incredible biscuit without it!
My Ideal Biscuit
When I first started baking professionally, I gravitated to contemporary biscuit recipes, such as Nancy Silverton’s, which produce those architectural biscuits I point to in the beginning of this piece. Silverton’s own biscuits call for four letter folds and feature nearly 50 grams of butter per biscuit. For the sake of research, and after reading Edna Lewis’ fondness for the brand, I made a batch of biscuits using the recipe on the back of the bag of White Lily self-rising flour. They came together in minutes, required no lamination, and produced some of the fluffiest, most tender biscuits I’d ever had despite the fact that the recipe calls for 46 grams of fat for the entire batch of twelve biscuits. What was happening here?
It’s here that I started really pondering fluff versus flake. A biscuit made with a low-protein flour, barely touched, and baked quickly in a very hot oven (like the White Lily recipe) produced a supremely fluffy biscuit, with a cloudlike, tender crumb. A biscuit with a higher fat ratio that has been carefully laminated produces a flaky biscuit, with distinct layers you can pull apart. Both are delicious, but I found myself drawn to the impossible tenderness and ease of the former.
With some occasional variation (such as Silverton’s butter-rich recipe), most biscuits adhere to roughly a 3:2:1 ratio of flour, liquid, and fat. Though older recipes might call for lard or shortening for the fat, I’d use butter for its simple, rich flavor. I’d keep my leavening at around the same level of the White Lily Self-Rising flour (1.5 tsp per cup of flour according to the website) for its powerful lift and open crumb. However, for my initial tests I settled on using Gold Medal all-purpose flour, a product with a 10.5 percent protein content that is widely available in America - I didn’t want to break any hearts for folks trying to hunt down White Lily farther afield. From my research, it looks like Waitrose Essential Plain White Flour has a very similar protein content at 10.7 for those of you in the UK!
Incorporating Fat
The variations between different biscuit recipes largely lies in the way the butter is incorporated, the type of dairy used, and the presence or lack of rough lamination. For my initial tests, I made a simple buttermilk biscuit dough adhering to the 3:2:1 ratio and compared the following ways of incorporating the butter:
Fridge-cold butter, worked into the dough by hand
Fridge-cold butter, worked into the dough with a stand mixer
Melted butter stirred into cold buttermilk
Fridge-cold butter, worked into the dough in a food processor
Frozen butter, grated
Working the cold butter into the dough by hand and using a food processor produced very, very similar results, with the latter perhaps slightly winning over the former. The truth is that I have both a hot kitchen and hot hands, and I generally get better results pulsing cold butter briefly into the flour with a machine. I used to have a pastry chef who would grab my hands when I was making doughs, shake her head in disgust, and complain that I had bread-making hands, not pastry-making hands, then smack me on the shoulder dismissively. I promise I would not ask you to drag an appliance out of a cabinet if I did not personally find it rewarding, though my hot hand trauma might be influencing this decision as well.
The melted butter method, while intriguing, didn’t quite do it for me with the initial test - I felt the result lacked the open crumb I was seeking for this particular biscuit. The stand mixer produced the toughest biscuit, overworking the dough. The frozen grated butter worked well, but not so well that it justified the task of grating frozen butter ever again.
Next, for the sake of science, I compared these initial biscuits to batches that I made using both fraisage and rough lamination methods to add height and layers to the dough. I took the base recipe and made one batch using the technique of fraisage to smear the butter into thin sheets of the dough, and then gave it three letter folds. I then made another batch, skipping the fraisage but giving the dough three rough letter folds before rolling it out.
The laminated biscuit doughs rose tall and true and reliably produced flaky biscuits, but I’d lost a little of the cloudlike edge I’d hoped to maintain. I decided to split the difference - I’d do one letter fold when rolling out the dough to keep the best of both worlds. I also added a little bit more butter to help ensure the dough would remain tender with a little extra handling.
The Dairy
Next, I’d determine the dairy I’d use. Buttermilk is classic, of course, but finding high quality, full-fat buttermilk can be a chore. For that reason the pastry chef Stella Parks recommends using full-fat yogurt instead, since it's widely available. I tested versions using full-fat buttermilk, lowfat buttermilk (the version most commonly available in grocery stores here), yogurt, plain kefir, and on a whim, sour cream.
The biscuits made with full-fat buttermilk, whole milk yogurt, and full fat kefir were all delicious. The low-fat buttermilk made the least appealing version, though it was honestly still pretty good. To my shock, the sour cream version was my favorite. I suppose it should be obvious that the fattier sour cream would make a delicious biscuit, but I’d honestly only tried it because I needed to use up a large tub of sour cream that was about to go bad.
I fear I may enrage Southern grandmas everywhere but I have to speak my truth: I recommend sour cream, and if you use it you will make an excellent dupe of the infamous Popeye’s biscuit, if that biscuit were as good as we all hoped it would be. I did end up adding a little more overall sour cream to help with the overall hydration of the dough with the thicker dairy. While we’re pissing people off, I may as well admit that I like to put a small amount of sugar in my biscuits as well. I find it helps balance the tang of the acidic dairy!
Baking techniques
For my next test, I played with another old-fashioned biscuit-making technique I’d read about, where biscuits are cut but not punched out and the dough is baked in one large mass.
This method is also sometimes mimicked by baking individually cut biscuits snugged up next to each other in a pan - the idea is you get better height when the biscuits are adjacent to each other. I found I missed the crisper edges of these particular biscuits that are baked with some space round them. With such a cloud-like, fatty center, you really need the contrast of the crisp edge! I did develop a pan-style biscuit for KP+ that features all the fluffy soft biscuit sides you could hope for:
A final flour head to head
Finally, I baked three final versions of the biscuits with my control flour, Gold Medal, along with White Lily and King Arthur unbleached All Purpose Flour. The difference in the bake and the height of the biscuits is really remarkable:
White Lily, with the lowest protein content, produced the shortest biscuit with a cloudlike fluffy texture. Gold Medal was reliably in the middle, with a little more structure and heft. King Arthur, an unbleached flour with the highest protein content at 11.7%, produced the tallest, flakiest biscuits. Here’s the thing: they were all delicious biscuits! If your goal is flake, throw another fold on the dough or use a slightly higher protein flour. If your goal is fluff, sneak a little cake flour in there or use a pastry flour like White Lily. I haven’t personally played with it, but the Waitrose Sponge Flour, which also has raising agents reportedly has a protein content of 9% and might be a good sub.
RECIPE: American Biscuits
Makes 8-9 biscuits
Ingredients:
360g all-purpose flour (see above for more details on protein content)
1 tbsp + 2 tsp baking powder*
½ tsp baking soda
1 ½ tsp kosher salt or flaky salt
1 tbsp sugar
170g butter, cold and cut into ½ inch chunks
300g sour cream, cold
A little melted butter and kosher salt, for topping the biscuits
*If you are using the waitrose self raising sponge flour, omit the baking powder. You’ll get a fluffier biscuit
Method:
Prepare a baking tray with parchment paper and set it aside. Prepare about 30 grams of melted butter to brush the tops of the biscuits.
Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl. Toss the cold cubed butter in the flour to coat it. To break up the butter by hand, pinch the butter chunks and continue to toss them in flour until they have mostly broken down roughly pea-sized pieces. Alternately, tip the flour/butter mixture into a food processor and pulse until you’ve achieved a coarse texture. Tip the flour back into the bowl - if there are any large chunks of butter remaining, flatten them by hand.
Add the sour cream to the butter flour mixture and stir with a rubber spatula or a wooden spoon until the mixture is mostly hydrated, with a few dry patches. Tip the dough out onto a very lightly floured countertop.
Dusting a very small amount of flour on top of the dough, roll it into a rectangle about one inch thick. Using a bench knife, fold the top third of the dough over the middle, and bring the bottom third of the dough over that fold to meet the edge. Rotate the dough and roll it out to about ¾ inch / 2 cm thick.
Using a biscuit cutter that is about 3” / 7.5 cm wide, punch out the first round of biscuits. Make sure you’re dusting the cutter with flour and punching straight down, avoiding a twisting motion, to ensure you get the most height from the biscuits.
When you’ve punched out as many biscuits as possible, gently bring the dough back together and punch out another round of biscuits (these will look a little wonky but taste amazing). Place the tray of biscuits in the freezer, if you have space, or the fridge. [Editor’s note: Well chilled or Biscuits baked from the freezer may bake up taller. For info on how best to bake from frozen, check Bronwen’s guide on her coffee cake scones)
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F / 232 C (no fan) / 210c fan. When the oven has reached the correct temp, pull the biscuits out and brush the tops with melted butter and sprinkle with a little kosher salt. Bake for 12-14 minutes or until the tops are golden brown and the center of the biscuits reaches about 195 F / 90 C degrees.
Biscuits are best eaten immediately.
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These look great (although I confess that I still don’t entirely understand how they’re not scones 😁)
I made these for my bridal shower and OMG i have to make another batch because i don’t want to share these lol they are so good