Attempt number 31 came out of the oven at 6:52 last Saturday morning, the tail end of spring break, and Jack ate the first one standing at the peninsula in his pajamas before I could get the butter dish open. "Nine," he said, with his mouth full. He has never given my biscuits a nine.
I keep count in tally marks on the back of my own biscuit card, the one filed behind Granny June's in the red tin box. The first marks are from 2010, copied over from an old notebook, back when I was a second-year teacher sure I could make anything. Granny's card is four words long: flour, lard, buttermilk, hot oven. She didn't need more. I needed fifteen years.
For most of those years my biscuits were fine. Buttered, eaten, gone by lunch. But hers stood taller, with layers you could peel apart with your thumb and an inside so tender it tasted almost sweet. Mine were dense with a decent top. These are the three changes that finally got me close.
The three changes
White Lily flour. Granny's card says "flour" because her kitchen only had one kind. White Lily is milled from soft winter wheat and has less protein than the national-brand all-purpose I bought for years. Less protein means less gluten, and less gluten means tender instead of chewy.
Frozen grated butter plus a little lard. This is the part I teach in cooking labs every fall. Cold fat makes flaky biscuits because the bits of fat stay solid in the dough, then melt in the hot oven and turn to steam, and the steam pushes the layers apart before the dough sets around them. Soft fat just blends in and you get dinner rolls. I grate butter straight from the freezer and pinch in two tablespoons of lard for the flavor hers had.
A hotter oven than I believed. Her card says "hot oven," and for a decade I read that as 425°F because most recipes say so. At 475°F the steam happens fast and the biscuits jump before the butter can leak out. Baked touching in her skillet, they hold each other up and rise straight.
The failure that taught me the most was attempt 27. I grated the butter, then left the bowl on the counter while I answered a call from my mom, in a kitchen already warm from the preheating oven. Fifteen minutes later the shreds had gone soft. Those biscuits spread like cookies and sat in a puddle of butter. Now if anything interrupts me, the whole bowl goes in the freezer for ten minutes.
Ingredients
- 2 1/2 cups White Lily all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled, plus more for the counter
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon fine salt
- 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, frozen at least 30 minutes
- 2 tablespoons cold lard
- 1 cup cold whole buttermilk, plus a tablespoon or two if needed
- 2 tablespoons melted butter, for the tops
How I make it
- Heat the oven to 475°F with a rack in the upper-middle. Lightly grease a 10-inch cast iron skillet or line a sheet pan with parchment.
- Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a wide bowl. Grate the frozen butter over it on the large holes of a box grater, tossing as you go so every shred gets coated. Pinch in the lard until the biggest pieces are the size of peas.
- Pour in the buttermilk and stir with a fork, about fifteen strokes, just until no dry flour is left in the bottom. It should look shaggy and a little sticky.
- Turn it out onto a floured counter and pat it into a rectangle about 3/4 inch thick. Fold it in thirds like a letter, pat it out again and repeat twice more.
- Pat it to 1 inch thick and cut with a floured 2 1/2-inch cutter, pressing straight down. Don't twist. Twisting pinches the edges shut and they won't rise.
- Set the biscuits in the skillet so they're touching. Press the scraps together once for two more.
- Bake 12 to 14 minutes, until they're tall, deep golden on top and brown underneath. Brush with melted butter as soon as they come out.
That makes nine or ten. To get ahead, freeze the cut biscuits on a sheet pan for an hour, then bag them for up to a month and bake straight from frozen, adding 3 or 4 minutes. That's how we get biscuits on a school morning. No lard? Use 8 tablespoons of butter total; they'll be very good and a touch less tender. A batch runs me about $2.50, a little more than a can of the refrigerated kind and not in the same universe.
On the back of my card I added a 31st tally mark and wrote "Jack: 9." Granny's card is still in front, where it belongs. I'll keep counting until somebody gives me a ten.
