- I am gonna attempt to make the perfect biscuit.
These biscuits are in my dreams.
(angelic singing)
What if they're horrible?
My job is done, I can leave!
I think I was 20.
I worked at this restaurant in the East Village
and they had an amazing biscuit.
I wen through a stage where I was eating
like biscuit or two a day, like, it was pretty hardcore,
I was obsessed with the biscuits.
Since then, I've tried to make my own
and every batch has come up short.
I have a few recipes I wanna try
before I even attempt to write my own.
Recipe number one, we have, one, two, three, four,
only six ingredients.
Seems chill.
Using your fingertips, rub butter and shortening
into the dry ingredients until mixture looks like crumbs.
Ugh, I hate measuring Crisco, it's so gross.
It's also, like, kind of hard to work with.
I imagine I won't be using this for my final one,
but I figured it would be good just to see.
Maybe Crisco does have some magical quality
that is important.
It grosses me out.
So the recipe says to make a well in the center.
All of the biscuit recipes that I'm testing today
have slightly different methods
for how you fold and cut them,
so I'm excited to see which one is the best
because I'm gonna steal it for my own.
Dough's coming onto the surface.
I mean, the dough feels really nice.
It doesn't feel too flour-y, it feels very hydrated.
Biscuit.
All right, and how do I get these babies out?
Okay, thank you.
- [Woman] Flour it.
- Thank you to Chelsea, good tip, flour the biscuit cutter.
Oh, Chels, look at that!
So that they just touch, I'm like, surprised.
Batch number one, wait, (beeping) 450.
- [Woman] Lena!
- Oops!
Shoot!
All right, batch number one.
All right, it's been 15, oh, they look good!
I'm gonna pull them out and see
if they feel like they need more browning or not.
But that was at the low end.
I think those are nice.
I don't think they look like they need more time at all.
They definitely look a little goofy, but in a good way.
They've got a little bit of a craggly top
and they look nice and baked,
even in the parts where they were touching.
Moment of truth, gotta see if they're as flaky as we want.
Lots of layers, nice and soft on the inside,
but the top is nice and crisp.
Well, crisp is probably the wrong word.
But it's got a little shell.
All right, can I try it?
Saltier than I was expecting,
for how much salt went into them.
The texture is pretty nice.
I don't really get the butter
and I'm getting a slightly weird mouth coat feel,
and I think that might be from the Crisco.
I'm gonna just say it now,
I don't think Crisco's gonna be in my official recipe.
Maybe it's just in my head, but I feel like
I'm tasting a weird like kind of funky aftertaste.
And I can only imagine that would be from the Crisco.
So, learned something, glad I made them,
but not the ultimate.
(upbeat, energetic music)
No time to waste, on to biscuit number two.
This next one uses a food processor,
which I'm kind of stoked about
because it's easy and I like things that are easy.
This one has sugar, which I actually feel really good about,
flour, butter, this one has two sticks
and the last had two tablespoons,
so I feel like these are going to be very different.
Okay, that looks pretty good.
It's coming together.
It's definitely pretty shaggy.
Mixture will look a little dry.
Okay.
It does feel very dry.
I'm a little worried about dumping it onto the surface,
that we're just gonna lose all our dough.
So, patting into an inch thick.
That's an inch.
And I'm gonna take my bench scraper
and cut it into quarters.
And then I am stacking each quarter on top.
All right, one inch thick rectangle.
This recipe specifies that you cannot re-roll any scraps,
so I'm gonna try to be sparing with what I trim.
10 to the freezer.
These have been in the freezer for 10 minutes.
And now I'm brushing them with butter.
I'm into that.
The interesting thing about this recipe is,
as soon as I put them in the oven, I reduce the temperature.
The oven is currently preheated to 425,
but as soon as I put them in, I'm reducing it to 400.
And these are baking for how long?
20 to 25, so a fair amount longer than the last ones.
Batch number two is ready.
They are massive.
They're actually pretty amazing looking.
I have to say, I'm excited to try these.
The layering is pretty crazy.
They're super tall, those pockets of butter just melted
into like a billion layers, and I'm very excited about it.
The tops are a little bit less brown than I'd like,
but they're turning very brown on the bottom,
which means that I had to pull them
earlier than I would have liked to
to get the color on the top.
I digress, I'm ready to dig in.
The texture looks really amazing.
These are pretty good.
I think the flavor in these is a lot better
than in the last batch we did.
The salt level is right.
I almost am still missing a little bit of
the sweetness from them.
I'm thinking my version will probably be
a little bit heavier on the sugar,
but I mean, they look incredible.
Like, they are so tall and so flaky.
(upbeat, energetic music)
Recipe number three.
We are using the combination of buttermilk and sour cream.
I'm excited about that because I love baking with sour cream
so we'll see how this one goes.
It keeps making this little flour that flies out of this,
but I don't know where it's coming from.
(upbeat, energetic music)
12 by 12 square.
How do you roll out a square?
12 by 12.
It's not a square.
(upbeat, energetic music)
Big ol' biscuits.
I'm like very curious how they're gonna turn out
when they're rolled so thin.
Well, they kinda look like pancakes, to be honest.
I'm a little apprehensive,
but don't judge a book by its cover.
I hope that they rise.
Well, they did have a ton of baking powder in them.
Maybe I'm the fool.
Now I'm gonna start my fourth biscuit.
My pancakes are ready.
AKA, flattest biscuits of all time.
(triumphant music)
You can see that they have tried to be layered,
but they're definitely too flat.
This one over here actually looks okay
and this was a re-roll.
Smells very buttery.
I think that I did something wrong,
but I think if I did it right
it would be taller and layered.
Flavor's not quite as good as the last one,
but texture's nice.
I'm gonna try a little bit of the top, just to see.
No sweetness, so you know I'm missing that.
I feel like if done correctly,
the layers would be kind of impressive,
but I think I might've just rolled this batch too thin.
(upbeat, energetic music)
It's a drop biscuit recipe,
so I'm not actually gonna be cutting out the biscuits,
which I am kind of excited about.
There's three-quarters cup of sugar.
I have been waiting for one of them
to taste a little bit sweeter,
so I'm hoping this one maybe hits the mark.
Oh, and it's baked at 350, which is kind of interesting,
because all of the other biscuits
have been baking at 400-plus.
So all in all, it's gonna be very different,
I think, texture wise, flavor wise.
So I'm adding the buttermilk
and I'm mixing it with my hands.
I think this is right.
It says balls, so I feel like
I should be rolling them in my hands.
So I'm just gonna do that, making 12 of these.
They don't look like any of the other biscuits we've made,
so I'm very excited to see how they'll turn out.
10 minutes in 350-degree oven.
All right, time to take the fourth batch out.
These biscuits are completely (beeping).
This is sad.
I'm almost completely positive I followed the recipe to a T.
I think my issue might have been that
I was gabbing too long and just taking too long in general
and the butter was too warm when I put them in the oven
so they turned flat.
To remedy this, I probably should've
stuck them in the freezer for like 20 minutes.
But I got hasty and as a result, these look so bad.
So bad.
Obviously not the flaky kind, but we knew that
because we didn't do any folding.
They're crazy.
They're definitely not correct.
This is a lot sweeter than I was picturing.
So for my own recipe, I don't think I'll go with
a full three-quarters cup, that seems a little excessive.
But I have to say, despite them looking like garbage,
they actually taste pretty good.
I've learned so much today.
I'm really excited to try my own recipe tomorrow.
I also just, I need a salad, really bad.
I don't feel very good at all.
(upbeat, energetic music)
Day two, we're back at it.
I am excited, nervous, still not hungry.
I'm gonna try a couple methods that I learned yesterday
and test them, see which one works better.
Borrowing a little tip from one of the recipes yesterday
and using some sour cream, not as much as they did,
but I'm gonna try it.
Let's just go for it.
(upbeat, energetic music)
I am going to divide the dough into two pieces
because I wanna try two different laminating techniques.
So the first technique I'm gonna try
is that stacking technique.
So I'm still gonna try to get it about an inch high.
Cool.
So this one, I'm gonna try out that folding method.
Hopefully with the amount of dough we have,
it won't be as difficult folding it over.
Once, and again.
And thisaway.
And then I'm just gonna roll it out one more time.
These are gonna be bigger, but that's okay.
I am going to pop these in the freezer for 10 minutes,
just to get that butter cold again, and then we will bake.
Ta-tah.
So these have been chilling for 10 minutes.
And I have a pretty good idea that
no matter what my biscuit recipe ends up being,
I will be brushing them in butter,
so I'm just gonna go ahead and do that for these.
I'm scared, what if they're horrible?
Stacked one on the bottom, folded ones on top.
See you in a few.
Maybe I'll just watch them.
So it turned out these took a good 20 minutes.
And I'm very excited to try them.
These are our stacked biscuits, of course,
and then these are our folded biscuits.
As I predicted, the folded edges,
obviously, kind of a bad look.
But this, the front edge is great.
It's got a lot of layering going on.
And then our stacked ones also had some good layering.
They're not as tall as the folded ones.
So right off the bat, that tells me
I think I'm gonna go with the folding method,
which I'm down for, I thought it was fun.
I like doing it.
So I'm liking what I'm seeing.
Lots to think about.
Might bring in some other tasters to help me.
Kenzie!
- Mmm, it looks like an accordion.
(laughing and talking over each other)
Am I allowed to give a suggestion?
- Yeah, oh, absolutely.
- I mean, I did, and I don't know anything.
- Have you tried preheating the pan with the oven
and then plopping?
(upbeat, energetic music)
Oop, the camera's here.
I was playing to this camera,
when I should've been playing to this camera.
(upbeat, energetic music)
We're gonna try that stacking method one more time.
Only this time, I'm gonna do it twice.
And then we're gonna go for another roll.
That was pretty good, actually.
Flatten once more.
And now we're just rolling it into a square
about an inch high, like last time.
We're basically just adding another round of layers,
which I feel pretty excited about.
I feel like that might make a difference.
Maybe it'll give us the layers that the other method did.
And that way, we could go with this method
which gives us our favorite crackly top.
I have high hopes for this method.
I'm gonna trim the edges because I want this batch to
potentially be the final method,
so I wanna test it exactly as I would.
I'm not doing anything different in the folding method,
but I am going to preheat the pan like McKenzie suggested
and see if that helps us get a little bit of a
better crunchy bottom than the last round.
So these guys are going into the freezer,
this time for 20 minutes,
because they've got so much butter I think they need it.
Later.
Our biscuits are still in the freezer,
they have five more minutes,
but I'm gonna pop this baking sheet into the oven now
to preheat it.
And then my folded ones are gonna get transferred.
All right, they're ready.
They're big and tall and ready to hang.
These guys, both looking good.
I think I probably need to cut them a little bit bigger
so that they have more of a base.
The topsy-turviness I need to figure out.
Yeah, separating it from that fold really helped.
The bottoms are better.
They're a lot more golden than the last round,
which I'm happy about.
We preheated the pan and it really worked.
But let's check out these.
The layers are looking a lot better this round,
but I think maybe comparable to these.
I've thought a lot about this,
but I think I'm gonna go with the fold method
and I'm very excited about it.
(upbeat, energetic music)
Coming out of the oven.
Looking pretty crazy.
And because two sticks of butter wasn't enough,
I'm just gonna brush these guys one more time.
Because I want them to shine.
They're standing perfectly straight.
Their tops look very crispy.
Their bottoms look like they've got some color.
Feeling good, y'all, I'm feeling real good.
We're done!
It's so good!
I'm still enjoying eating more biscuits.
I'm kind of worried for my health.
Little salty, little sweet, insanely buttery,
crispy top, crispy bottom.
(upbeat, energetic music)
We made it.
I couldn't be happier or more full.
Thank you for coming on this journey with me.
We've been through at least 10 pounds of flour and butter.
And I'm finally happy.
I found the biscuit of my dreams and I hope you'll try it.
Don't forget to like and subscribe
and let me know in the comments below
what your favorite type of biscuit is.
If you have any tips or tricks, I would love to hear them.
Mmm!
(upbeat, energetic music)