- Hey I'm John Kanell,
today on Preppy Kitchen we're making sky high,
buttery flaky biscuits.
So let's get started.
First off,
we're gonna measure out four cups
or 480 grams of all purpose flour.
If you've never made biscuits before it is
so fun to do.
And they're amazing compared to the store bought kind.
So you're gonna love this recipe.
It's one of our favorites at home.
All right, 480 exactly.
Using a scale gives you the best results.
We need one tablespoon of baking powder.
That's our leavening agent.
Two teaspoons of salt.
This is gonna give us our little bit
of extra you know flavor.
We're also gonna use two tablespoons of granulated sugar.
Okay, now the fun part starts.
We're gonna get one cup
or 226 grams of cold butter.
Don't let it stay out it needs to be like this,
rock hard.
Usually in baking we want room temperature butter,
but if you're making something like pastry or biscuits,
you'll want cold butter.
And I will say like,
if you're gonna splurge on an ingredient,
use like a nice butter for this because you'll taste it.
You can also use a European style butter,
which has more fat,
less water in it
and you'll get even puffier,
flakier results.
Let me give you a lot of tips for flaky biscuits.
Give me some of the comments if you have them too.
This is a recipe that I like to do all by hand.
The only tool I use is
the whisk and the like a knife and my cutter
for making the circles.
If you use a food processor,
or even if you use like a pastry blender,
like a little cradle knife thing,
you just don't get the same results in my humble opinion.
You can let me know if you disagree though, okay.
All that butter is cut up in here.
Now we're gonna use our clean hands.
This is like something the kids would love to help on
but they're at school right now.
I'm gonna coat all the butter with flour
so it doesn't clump.
And now I'm going to start breaking it apart
into smaller pieces.
This is a nice time to just reflect and have a moment.
It's just like one of the few times where you're like,
not on your phone.
You're just having like a tactile moment.
And it feels really nice in your hands like
the butter and the flour.
Continue breaking this up and as you do,
you're gonna start working the butter in like this.
Smush it together like that.
We want to do everything we can
to get like nice flaky layers.
I don't have any milk out right now.
That's because it's in the fridge too.
Everything is gonna be cold.
All right,
so now the butter's getting worked up
into smaller pieces and I'm smushing it together.
It's also warming up a bit.
I have ice cold hands,
which is like the only thing that's good
for is baking.
Like doing something like this.
If your mixture was warming up
because you have hot hands or it's a hot day,
you could pop this into the fridge
or the freezer and just like come back in a minute
to like have a sip of coffee or two.
Now I had a couple sips of coffee.
I think I'm talking really fast.
We want a crumbly mixture.
And the butter should be between the size
of a pea and an almond.
It's like this bit right here,
that's nice.
That's like a good sized piece of butter.
You want to have big pieces
of butter because you want to have big buttery,
flaky biscuits.
So don't worry about it being all worked in together.
I'm just like double checking
there's no big pieces that are too big.
And now it's time to get that cold milk.
I'm still drinking that coffee.
Now we're gonna grab our cold milk.
Right now I'm gonna pour the milk in.
I want one and a third cups or 320 mils,
move it around so it's not a lake of milk.
This is gonna be a wet mixture.
This actually reminds me of making a proper English scone
which is one of my favorite things to eat.
And you can let me know
if you want me to make that video again.
I've kind of changed my recipe on it.
So when you make something like this,
it has a wet,
wet dough and you're like oh this is wrong.
Double checking the recipe,
rethinking your ingredients and like everything else,
it's supposed to be that way and it'll come out.
So you'll see right now,
this mixture looks a little bit like,
what is this?
What is this nonsense over here?
But it's gonna work out.
My dough is moistened,
but it's still crumbly.
Like it doesn't look like it's come together yet,
but it will.
So, plop that mixture out onto your floured counter.
This is gonna get patted out into a rectangle right now.
So pat it out.
I's not gonna look perfect,
that's totally fine.
Here's the deal,
keep this moving.
Feel free to add more flour underneath.
We're going to work this into
a one inch thick rectangle.
And one inch is pretty thick
so feel free to break
out your little measuring tape or whatever.
Don't make your biscuits too thin.
Fold this over now.
Okay, after you fold it,
you're gonna cut this in half.
I'm using a bench scraper,
but use whatever you'd like.
And now we stack,
this is important.
You're creating more layers basically.
It's like if you're making a rough puff
or you're making regular pie dough,
that's the trick for making regular pie dough.
You just fold it a couple of times
and pat it out and you get those nice flaky pages.
Okay, moving it around.
We're gonna pat this out again into the rectangle.
And this gets repeated three times.
So there's four folds
and four pats.
Fold number two.
Cut number two.
Oh, I'm not gonna eat this raw,
but I want to.
When we cut this you're gonna see little layers.
And I have a question,
so this is like something I've been really wondering about
and I want to get like a lot of feedback.
When you make biscuits,
it's actually so visually pleasing to see a round biscuit,
but you have to waste it,
that you have to go,
you have like roll it back up and cut.
But some people just cut square biscuits.
What do you like?
What would you do?
I'm tempted to do the square biscuits
but that wasn't,
I don't know.
I've just never done it before.
It seems too easy.
Number three,
fold it.
Cut it,
stack it.
I mean I can see the layers
on the side here and haven't even finished this yet.
Okay, one last fold one last cut
and one last stack.
Now we're gonna pat this out
into a one inch thick rectangle and now this is the point
where you're not supposed to go too thin.
So, it should be an inch thick.
You want them to be up high to the sky.
Grab a baking sheet
and now we're gonna choose our shape.
Circles, here's the deal.
You do not want to have spent all this time making
this amazing biscuit dough and seal the edges.
So we're flouring this cutter every single time.
And I'll be cleaning it off too.
Look at those layers in there.
That's it,
I see the butter,
little pages.
This looks amazing.
I like to wipe this down
and then flour it again.
Plop that down.
Do you know that a good biscuit goes with everything?
You could have it with breakfast.
You could have it with lunch and dinner,
little chicken.
And my boys love biscuits.
(bright music)
Let's be careful not
to like manhandle the sides at all.
They really want to be nice and free.
We have some scraps here.
I'm gonna use every single one of them.
They're gonna be delicious,
but just not the prettiest things.
I'm having these in the morning,
I will just have a biscuit
with some really nice butter melting in there.
And then a little bit of like soft scrambled eggs,
maybe some smoked salmon.
Notice, I didn't say pre-heat your oven yet
because we're gonna pop these into the freezer
for at least 20 minutes.
You can actually bake them straight from like full frozen.
So if you want,
bake up a few,
freeze the rest for later.
But right now into the freezer you go.
We'll be back.
My biscuits are nice and firm.
They're gonna go into the oven now for about 20 minutes
until they're golden brown,
then one final touch.
(upbeat music)
- All right.
I just pulled these out of the oven
and this did not go according to plan,
they're all a little bit toppled over.
You can see the layers though.
Totally delicious,
but I'm gonna show you what happened.
They're a little bit too thick.
So I went over an inch
and we're gonna have
to like remake them again really quickly.
And just pat them down to be exactly an inch
to maybe a little bit less,
maybe three quarters.
Second time's a charm.
And that's more like it.
Oh my gosh.
They're as light as air
and just delicious.
I'm gonna grab some butter but I hope you get a chance
to make this recipe and I'll see you in the next video.
If you like this recipe,
check out my bread playlist.