Hi Bold Bakers.
A few weeks ago, I introduced you to my friend
and very talented baker, Brian Hart Hoffman.
He very generously shared a recipe with us for a hummingbird cake.
You guys were over the moon about it.
So I asked him again to share another recipe.
Brian was born and raised in Alabama, so I asked him to share a really great
Southern recipe with us.
So check out his world famous buttermilk biscuits.
Thank you, Gemma.
You know, I love any chance I have to bake with you.
So to have you in my kitchen today is so much fun.
And bake from scratch.
We celebrate the global
baking community in every single recipe and the way it brings people together.
So for this episode, I'm inviting you to the South for me to make biscuits.
And this is a recipe that's near and dear to my heart.
It's the first thing I learned to make with my mom.
And these buttermilk biscuits have laminated layers,
and that is all the flaky layers and a biscuit that make them so amazing.
And I can't wait to share with you how easy it is.
I know you're going to love them.
So let's get started.
The recipe can be found at BiggerBolderBaking.com
Now we're going to start with a large bowl,
and I've got all purpose flour already in the bowl.
And to this, I'm adding cake flour.
Now, this flour combination was created to mimic that soft winter
wheat with low protein that we get in the south in a bag of white flour.
And you'll hear a lot of people say that is the flour you need to make biscuits.
But we know that you can't get it around the world.
So we created this flour blend so that you get nice tender biscuits at home also.
Then I'm going to add just a little bit of granulated sugar, some kosher salt,
and then some baking powder.
Now, these aren't too sweet, so the sugar is just a nice soft flavor enhancer.
But it's not going to be sweet like you might find with a shortcake
or even some scones that are a little bit sweet.
Wonder what Gemma has to say about a sweet scone.
All right.
Simple as that. Okay.
I've got my dry ingredients combined.
Now we're going to work with cold ingredients.
So I have unsalted butter that has been cubed and then refrigerated
so that it stays cold until I add it to the recipe.
And the first thing we're going to do is we are going to cut this in,
and that means we're going to get this butter broken down
into small piece sized pieces using a pastry blender,
and that's going to coat the butter and flour.
And it starts out a little tough, but I just use the pastry blender
and press down and turn.
Eventually you'll start to break down the butter into small pieces
and I'll show you along the way.
When I was a kid, I remember learning to bake biscuits with my mom.
I think that's probably one of the first things
that any Southern kid should learn how to do in the kitchen.
And we'd wake up on Saturdays and my mom's biscuit recipe was more of a
starter together and spoon onto the baking tray more of a drop biscuit.
But I quickly fell in love with these flaky
layers of laminated biscuits as I learned how to bake.
So this has quickly become the favorite in my household,
alternately to using a pastry blender.
You can do this all by hand.
The goal is just to take the butter and break it down into small pieces,
toss it in the flour and work until you have the right texture.
You can see the mixture is starting to look a little bit
more crumbly and less dry.
So that tells me I've got the butter worked nicely throughout.
And one thing you can do to check and make sure that the butter is nice
and distributed is you can pick up and clump it together
and if that holds its shape in your hand,
there's enough butter in there to hold it together.
So now I'm ready to add our cold buttermilk.
So what I do is I move my butter mixture to the side
and I form a well in the center of the bowl.
And then I'll pour my cold buttermilk into the center.
And then still using my hands.
The best tool for biscuit baking.
I form a claw and I just start to pull the flour and butter mixture
through the buttermilk until I have a nice shaggy dough.
Now, if you do not have access to buttermilk, you can make your own.
And there is a recipe available to you at BiggerBolderBaking.com
It's very simple.
And you love the nice tang you get from the flavor.
I recommend doing that if you've never done it before.
Now I'm just stirring this through and you can start to see portions of
the dough are rather wet, but I still have some of the dry ingredients over here,
so I do want to work just a little bit more in the bowl
to get all of these ingredients incorporated before I turn it out.
With our shaggy dough, I've got an bowl here of flour.
And this is just a bowl of flour you're going to use to coat the surface.
You can put it in a bowl that no measurement needed
and it just kind of flour my surface and I'm going to turn out this shaggy dough.
Now you can see that it still needs a little bit of work to get everything
combined, and I find it's easier to do outside the bowl at this point.
So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start shaping our biscuit
dough into a rectangle, and this can be a rough rectangle.
We're just starting to get everything together.
But with biscuit dough, you want to work very gently
because we want them to stay nice and tender.
We're not going to need the dough like you would for other kinds of bread.
We want this to stay nice and tender with those flaky layers,
so I'm just going to form into a rectangle using my hand to shape my dough.
Like I said before, it's just a really nice, rough
process that you're working with your hands.
And now we're going to start to build our layers.
And this is the lamination and that's the that the process
by which we're going to add layers and I'm going to take a bench knife
or a sharp knife, and I'm just going to order my biscuit dough.
And then we're going to start stacking.
And this is a process we're going to do four times starting out.
It looks rather crumbling.
But over the process of adding our layers,
you're going to start to see this dough come together and hold shape.
So I'm just going to pat this back into a rectangle
and do that three more times as the biscuit dough comes together.
If it starts to stick to your bench knife or your knife,
just put a little flour on it and then you can quarter
your dough again.
And now you can see it's starting to hold shape better.
You see these beautiful bits of butter marbled throughout and that cold butter is
what's going to hit that hot oven and give us those beautiful layers.
Be sure to keep a little bit of flour
under your biscuit dough so it doesn't stick to the counter.
And as we start to get this nice dough coming together,
you can use the sides of your bench knife to square everything back up.
So we're starting to get that perfect rectangle
as we get close to the end of this stacking process.
As I travel the world and talk with people about biscuits,
it's easily confused with what we call cookies in other places.
And I find that biscuits are really the bread of the South.
Everyone in the area I live has a favorite style of biscuit,
and then in other parts of the world, people have never heard
of this Southern style biscuit.
All right, it's time for our last cut.
And then this will be the
final pat down before we cut out our biscuits.
And you can see this dough has gotten nice and smooth.
You have these nice layers you can already see,
but it's not crumbly like it was when we started.
So no need to overwork your dough.
Some people like to use
a rolling pin at this stage, but I still prefer to use my hands
just as the easiest part of the process
for me is patting this out and it keeps your biscuits
nice and rustic and handmade from start to finish.
When you're doing your final rollout or final
pat down, you want to get your dough to one inch thickness.
And at this point, it's nice and smooth.
And if you are using a rolling pin, I sort of put
a little flower on your rolling pin and then gently work the dough.
You're not putting any pressure, really.
You're just letting the rolling pin smooth out the biscuit dough
until you get the right thickness.
And that's it.
I don't want to overwork this, though, because like I've said, I want it
to be nice and tender, soft, flaky biscuits.
Now, here's a biscuit tip I want you to remember
when using a biscuit cutter your first going to coat it in flour
so that it doesn't stick to the biscuit dough and then cutting it out.
You're simply going to take your biscuit cutter and press down and lift up.
No twisting.
What that's going to do is it's going to take away
these beautiful layers that we've built in the dough
and that straight up down allows the layers to lift when they hit the hot oven.
So again, be sure to dip
your biscuit cutter in flour and then a nice up down motion.
Never twisting your prettiest biscuits will be from the first roll out.
So I always cut as close as I can to the next one
so that I get as many biscuits out of this first roll
out of the dough.
At this point,
you can take the remaining dough and just gently stack it back together.
And then reroll and cut out your biscuits.
They're not going to look as pretty as the first,
but they're going to taste just as delicious.
After cutting out your biscuits.
You do want to freeze them until they're solidly frozen.
And that can be about 40 minutes to an hour.
Or you can do it the day before and it's done for the morning
when you want to bake fresh biscuits.
Now bold bakers
The biscuit dough is frozen.
The oven is preheated.
And now it's time for some finishing touches.
I'll start by putting an egg wash
on the top of each biscuit.
Just a nice light coating will give us the perfect
golden brown biscuit when these come out of the oven.
Then after your egg wash, we're going to finish up
with some nice, flaky salt.
And this is so good.
You're going to love
the little nice crunch and bites of salt on the top of these biscuits.
If you didn't want to use an egg in this recipe,
you could coat the tops of these with melted salted butter .
And then you get a nice golden finish with that as well.
Now these are off to a 425
degree Fahrenheit, 220 degrees Celsius oven.
And these are going to bake until golden brown and nice and flaky.
And that's about 15 minutes.
And then my favorite way to eat them as warm from the oven.
Wait, you see it?
Oh, y'all.
We got hot biscuits coming in, and they smell so good.
Like I told you, my favorite way to eat them
is to get one right off that baking tray and the like.
We made all those layers and it just splits open so beautifully.
Then you get to decide and make it your own how you want to eat it.
Like I told you, buttering a biscuit
only makes up better because we need more of that deliciousness in here.
Go ahead and put the lid back on.
Let it melt for just a second.
And then my favorite is strawberry jam.
When I was younger,
my mom would ask my twin brother and I what we wanted on the biscuit.
And I always said Strawberry jam.
Always, always, always.
So then you sandwich that together like that and dig in.
so good
looks like I've got a tray of biscuits to eat.
But first I would love to invite you to join me over at BakeFromScratch.com
and join our magazine community there.
And then of course, don't forget, you can get the full recipe
for these buttermilk biscuits at BiggerBolderBaking.com
Gemma, thanks so much for having me.
I can't wait to see all the bold bakers making buttermilk biscuits
and I know you're going to love them. Can't wait to see you next time.