Buttermilk Biscuits

Another biscuits recipe!  And as I loaded these photos, I realized that we’re back into a lot of beige food.  With summer winding down, good fruit is becoming harder to come by in these parts, so I imagine I’ll need to wait until next summer to complete the (many) remaining recipes in the MSBH that require beautiful, fresh fruit.  Something to look forward to.

Until then, a very basic, very beige recipe for Buttermilk Biscuits.  These come together quickly in the same way almost all the MSBH biscuit recipes do: cut butter into dry ingredients, add liquid, form, bake.

Every ingredient in this recipe is some shade of white.

The dough is turned out onto a lightly floured table and just patted down with your hands – no rolling pin necessary.

Then it’s just a matter of forming the individual biscuits.

I left the butter in larger chunks than I usually do when I was cutting it into the dry ingredients.  You can really see the butter hunks in the raw biscuits.

I ended up with eighteen 2 1/2″ biscuits.  I only had one baking sheet available (my other one was housing a batch of sprouts I was sprouting) so I put six aside to bake after the first batch was done.  I only mention this because these six that had to wait on the counter for about 25 minutes yielded much fluffier, prettier biscuits when all was said and done.  After thinking about it, I realized this makes sense given the leavening and the acidic buttermilk, especially since I use double-acting baking powder.

The tops were brushed with buttermilk prior to going in the oven.  I didn’t do this on the second batch and you really cannot tell – the tops came out looking the same.  An egg wash would have probably resulted in a more distinctively golden-brown top.

This is another biscuit that is baked directly on the pan.  Even though my biscuits took about 8 minutes longer to bake than the recipe indicated, the bottoms didn’t burn.  They still became darker than I like.  I always prefer to use parchment paper with biscuits.

You can sort-of see the biscuits on top of the pile are much taller and airier; these are the ones that waited 30 minutes before going into the oven.  Those that baked first are much flatter and denser.

The MSBH says these are good with butter and jam, and I agree.  They are very sweet, moist biscuit and overall, a little too sweet and too dense for my liking.  But that’s a personal preference thing and can see myself making this recipe again under the right circumstances (like an intense craving for biscuits with butter and jam).

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