Today we are making biscuits.
This is Stella Parks’ recipe from seriouseats.com and it is one of the best and easiest biscuit
recipes I’ve ever tried.
Since it’s strawberry season, we’ll stuff them with strawberries and whipped cream.
But this recipe works not only for sweet, but also for savory application.
So if you want to make biscuits and gravy, you don’t have to change anything in this
dough.
What’s convenient about this recipe is that it’s formulated for plain yogurt instead
of buttermilk.
Buttermilk is great, but I don’t always have it, but plain yogurt is in my fridge
at all times.
The kind you want for this recipe is an average American plain yogurt, not the super thick
Greek yogurt.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Cut up 1 stick of cold unsalted butter into 1/2 inch cubes.
Weigh out 255 grams of bleached all-purpose flour.
You can certainly use unbleached, but bleached will result in more delicate biscuits.
Add 1 tablespoon of granulated sugar.
1 tablespoon of baking powder 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
1 and 1/2 teaspoons of Diamond Crystal Kosher salt, which is 3/4 of a teaspoon of table
salt or 4.2 grams of any salt weighed on a high precision scale
Whisk it all up for about 30 seconds.
Add the butter and toss it to coat it with flour.
If some pieces are stuck together, separate them back into individual cubes.
Then move all the butter to one side of the bowl so that you can easily tell which pieces
you squooshed and which ones you didn’t.
After you go through all the pieces of butter, go through this mixture again to break up
the butter to the size of peas.
This time I am not methodically going through every single piece.
If some pieces are a bit bigger and some smaller, that’s ok.
Try to use your finger tips, not your palms, and work quickly so that the butter doesn’t
warm up.
See -- this piece is too big, but if we break it in half, it will be just right.
Add 255g of plain yogurt and mix everything together with a silicone spatula or a large
spoon.
Press very firmly on the dough and smear it with the back of your spatula to help it absorb
the flour and layer in the butter.
Keep working like this until you have no powdery flour.
Your dough shouldn’t be smooth or cohesive, but all the flour should be hydrated.
Sprinkle your work surface and your hands with flour and clean off the spoon.
Turn the dough out onto your generously floured work surface and pat it into a square that
is 1/2 inch thick.
Make sure your hands are floured or the dough will stick to you.
A pastry scraper is handy for squaring off the edges.
The exact shape is not very important here.
What’s important is that the shape is symmetrical so that you can fold the dough in half.
Reflour the work surface and your hands and pat it into 1/2 inch thickness again.
This is going to be our second fold.
Folding the dough is what’s going to give our biscuits layers.
Reflour everything again and do one more fold.
We need a total of 3 folds.
Let’s get it a bit more even before this final fold.
That’s looking good.
I think we are ready for the fold.
Here we go.
Place your dough on a very well floured surface.
This will ensure that your biscuits won’t stick to the pan.
After the last fold, it’s important NOT to thin out the dough quite as much.
You want the thickness of roughly 3/4 of an inch.
To cut the biscuits I use a cookie cutter, but a thin glass will work too.
Mine is 2 and 3/4 of an inch in diameter, but you can choose a different size if you
want.
If your cutter sticks, clean it off with your fingers and flour it up.
Collect the scraps,
pat them into an oval shape,
and this should give you 2 more biscuits.
Then collect the scraps again and shape them the best you can into the final biscuit.
Now, let’s talk about the pan.
Cast iron will give you the best bottom crust, but I’ve baked them in a springform pan
and a cake pan with great results.
The ideal size pan would be 10 inches.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a cast iron pan of that size.
Mine is 11 inches so there’ll be a little room around my biscuits, but that’s not
a problem.
They should be touching each other in the pan to create that pull apart effect when
they are done.
If necessary, shape the last biscuit into an oval shape to make it fit.
Bake in the middle of the oven until the biscuits are well-risen and golden brown.
This will take about 20 minutes.
While they are baking, let’s prep our strawberries and whipped cream.
Cut up about a pound of strawberries.
Splash them with lemon juice and sugar.
I can’t really give you the amounts.
It depends on your strawberries and your taste.
Mix them up and let them sit for at least 20 minutes.
For the whipped cream, I like to combine heavy cream and creme fraiche.
Creme fraiche will give me a slight tang and it will also help my cream stay stable for
many hours.
I’ll add 1 Tbsp of powdered sugar, but you can use more or less depending on your taste,
and a splash of vanilla extract.
Whip it starting at moderate speed to prevent splashing and as soon as it starts to foam,
you can crank your speed all the way up.
Of course, make sure your cream is cold, otherwise it will have a hard time whipping.
Stop as soon as you reach a thick texture so that you don’t turn it into butter.
Once your cream is whipped, keep it in the fridge until you are ready to serve.
Let’s see how our biscuits are doing.
They look great!
Give them 10 minutes and they are ready to serve.
They taste much better warm than cold, so if you make them ahead, wrap them very tightly
in foil and rewarm at 350F for 10 to 12 minutes or until hot.
I have even revived day old biscuits with great results this way.
My favorite way to eat them is to break them in half and spread with a little extra butter.
But using these biscuits for strawberry shortcakes is not half bad either.
This is my kind of dessert -- tons of butter and barely any sugar.
My favorite part is the super crispy buttery crust soaked in strawberry juice.
Here are more very detailed culinary tutorials for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.