Issue #141: Flaky Biscuits
Moving Chaos, Open Food, Breakfast Challenge Leads to Biscuits!
We are in the middle of the beginning of our move. Last week we closed on our house in Plainfield, New Hampshire. The movers come Friday. We are already officially residents of the Granite State, with New Hampshire drivers licenses, New Hampshire license plates, and New Hampshire dog tags for Milo.
We’ve begun to move things into our new house that the movers won’t take, namely open food. And, as you might imagine, we have a lot of it. So far I’ve emptied out two freezers, about 1/3 of two different refrigerators, 1/4 of the spice pantry, and a few shelves of dry goods. There is so much more.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t thinking strategically when I packed things up. For example, I moved all of the yogurt, granola, maple syrup, and sliced bread from New York to New Hampshire. I kept the jam. This severely limited the breakfast options when we woke up this morning in Manhattan.
Speaking about breakfast options in New York, an aside to celebrate the perfect New York bagel. We set out on the road early for our last few trips to New Hampshire, around 6 am, right when our neighborhood favorite Tal Bagels opens. We stopped for breakfast, of course. Both times, as if to remind us what we are leaving behind in this move, their hot-out-of-the-oven, crunchy, chewy everything bagels oozing melted cream cheese were absolute perfection. You can do all the bagel comparisons you want, running around to this shop and that, bringing them back to some tasting laboratory to compare. But on a dark, chilly morning when you just happen on a bagel in its perfect state and you enjoy it in your car with a nondescript, piping-hot, black coffee, there is no better bagel to be had. Just typing this makes me salivate.
Although I’ve been feeding my sourdough starter religiously through this chaotic period, I haven’t had the wherewithal to make bread this week. So, what was I to do for breakfast at home on a snowy day? Yesterday was Nate’s lucky day. I decided to bake some of my flaky biscuits.
Like those perfect bagels, these perfect biscuits are about as good as morning carbs can be. This is a recipe I’ve used for years, interrupted only briefly when I stumbled across the Butter Swim Biscuits I wrote about in Issue #50. I still appreciate those uniquely buttery cousins, but these classic biscuits remain a perennial favorite.
There are some people who can make biscuits in their sleep. I think of my friend Evelynne, who had made so many biscuits she never used a recipe. She pushed the ingredients around in a bowl with a fork and then pinched balls of dough between her forefinger and thumb to form perfect puffs that baked into impossibly light biscuits.
Other people are totally intimidated.
This is a good recipe, no matter your biscuit skill, because it is hard to overwork the dough. By laminating the dough, that is, stacking and rolling it out a few times to create layers of butter that steam and rise, the biscuits are sure to come out flaky and light. Serve them warm with extra butter and jam.
Or, if you don’t want to bother, go get yourself a hot bagel with cream cheese.
RECIPE: Mitchell’s Flaky Biscuits
2½ teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
3½ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup (2 sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch cubes
1 cup chilled buttermilk
1 egg beaten with a tablespoon water and a pinch of salt
Preheat your oven to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the baking powder, sugar, salt, baking soda, and flour, Whisk once or twice to blend. Add the cubed butter and, using both hands, rub it into the flour by squeezing the pieces of butter dredged in flour between your thumb and forefinger to flatten them and break them up. Work quickly to keep from softening the butter too much. Keep dipping your hands into the flour, squeezing butter and flour, until all of the butter is broken down to small pieces and the flour has a yellow hue. Don’t worry if some pieces of butter are a little bigger than others. As with pie crust, I find some unevenness adds to the flakiness at the end.
Alternately, you can combine the dry ingredients in the bowl of a food processor, add the butter and pulse until the butter is broken down and incorporated. Transfer to a mixing bowl to proceed.
Once the butter is broken down, drizzle the cold buttermilk into the bowl while pushing the ingredients together from side to side with the back of a fork. Continue until all the buttermilk is in and the dough begins to form into a shaggy clump. It will look dry. Turn this mixture out onto a clean work surface and with your hands continue pressing and kneading the dough together until all of it coheres into a mass. It doesn’t have to be smooth or even, just hold together. With floured hands and/or rolling pin, pat and roll out to a rectangle that’s about 1-inch thick.
With a bench scraper or knife, cut the rectangle into 4 even pieces. Stack the pieces on top of each other like a tower. Then push them down with the rolling pin to flatten about half its height. Sprinkle an area of the work surface with flour and use a bench scraper to lift and turn the dough onto that surface. Sprinkle the dough with some more flour. Roll out to a decent sized rectangle, 1-inch thick. (If you’ve laminated dough before, note that due to the thickness of biscuit dough, you get better, more even lift on the edges if you cut and stack rather than simply fold.) Again, cut into 4 equal pieces, stack, press, flour, and roll. Cut the dough into 12 equal squares, place them on the parchment lined sheet pan and chill at least 30 minutes.
Brush the top of each biscuit with the egg wash and bake in the preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes, until the biscuits have risen and nicely browned on both top and bottom. Serve warm.
