How to Make the Perfect Biscuits at Home

Hi, I'm Adrienne Cheatham.

I'm a professional chef,

and today, I'm gonna show you

how to make the best biscuits at home.

We are talking crispy, fluffy, airy, delicious,

and not those lifeless pale blobs of dough.

This is biscuits 101.

To me, the perfect biscuit

is like croissants thicker cousin.

It's denser and thicker on the inside,

but it still has that beautiful shattering crust

on the outside.

There are very few ingredients, very few steps.

It's just a matter of the technique

that you use to make them.

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The most important thing when you're making biscuits

is keep it cold.

Keep your fat as cold as possible

so it doesn't melt and soak into the flour

and make your biscuits heavy.

The first thing we're gonna do

is grate butter on a box grater.

You can't grape butter once it's soft,

so it's best to just throw it in the freezer

the night before.

[butter thudding]

It is rock hard.

You do wanna work quickly

so you don't let your butter heat up.

Another important part of why we keep the butter so cold

is because we're baking our biscuits at 425.

You don't wanna give the butter a chance to slowly melt

while it's starting to bake.

You wanna shock it with heat

so that right away,

the water content of the butter evaporates

and that's what gives you the lift inside the biscuits.

I'm using the large holes on the box grater

because I want big, flat, long pieces of butter.

They really give you a more defined pocket of air

in your biscuits.

The butter is grated.

I'm gonna pop it in the freezer

so it stays really, really cold.

So now I'm gonna mix all of my dry ingredients.

All-purpose flour, regular, degular ass flour,

same that you'll get anywhere.

Wondra flour.

The cool thing about wondra flour

is that it is a pre-gelatinized starch.

That means the starch has actually been kind of cooked,

so starch molecules swell up

and this flour has been cooked so that it swells up

and then they stop that process.

So it's better to mix with cold ingredients.

It also takes shorter of a cooking process

because you don't have to go through the whole swelling

and cooking of the starch molecule,

and it has a little bit lower protein,

which means lower gluten, which means your biscuits

will be a little fluffier and lighter

because you don't have as many of the gluten strands

giving you that chew

that you would get using all-AP flour.

Sugar. You need a little bit of dimension and flavor.

So salt and sugar kind of balance that out.

It also helps with the browning process

when the biscuits are baking later.

Baking powder and baking soda.

We're using two leavening agents

to get maximum lift in these biscuits.

I do like to use a whisk with the dry ingredients

because it just really helps get everything incorporated

and dispersed very thoroughly.

Now we add our frozen butter.

I am just going to toss with the flour

in the dry ingredients

because I really want each little shard of butter

to be coated in the flour mixture.

So that way, we have these beautiful

little individual pieces of butter

that will give us such nice flavor

and such nice lift in our biscuits.

So I'm just lifting from the bottom

and letting the butter and flour fall through my fingers.

I'm not pressing it or packing it.

So this is how it should look.

You wanna see these beautiful little curls of butter

coated thoroughly in the dry ingredients.

This will also help keep them separate

when we add our wet ingredients.

It's kind of like breading a piece of chicken to fry it.

It'll have its own little coating

so that way, it'll stay separate from everything else.

You don't need to overwork this.

You just wanna do it a few times

until you see all the butter is coated

and you should be good to move on to the next step.

So buttermilk is a little bit acidic.

It gives you a nice tangy flavor.

We have a lot of fat in the dough with the butter,

so the buttermilk will provide us

with a little bit of tart tanginess

to kind of balance out the flavor of the biscuit.

So at this point, I am using a spatula.

I don't wanna get in there with my hands

because it'll take me so long

to clean everything off my hands

that I will warm up the butter in the process.

I'm just barely folding everything together

with this silicone spatula,

going around the edge and folding it through

just to kind of disperse the buttermilk

into the ingredients.

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I have a piece of parchment paper here on the board,

on the work surface

because I don't wanna touch the dough too much.

So putting the parchment paper down

and adding the ingredients in

to press it into a rectangle

will help me move it to put it into the refrigerator

without having to, like, fumble it and mess it all up

once I've made this nice rectangle.

So the ingredients are still very separate-ish.

Buttermilk will slowly hydrate the flour,

but you don't wanna start with a dough that's too wet.

I'm not really kneading it.

We wanna keep it in these nice shards

that are just barely coated in flour

and just barely held together with buttermilk.

Now this part does get dangerous.

My hot hands are touching this dough,

so I'm working quickly just to form it into a rectangle.

I'm just barely pressing everything together.

If you feel it getting sticky,

you can just put a little flour on your hands

and I'm just going to kind of guide it with one hand

and make a nice clean edge with the other.

Boom. There we go.

Now I'm gonna transfer this to a sheet tray with the paper.

All I have to do is pull it

and this is gonna go back into the refrigerator

to stay nice and cold.

This dough is so pretty.

This is kind of the fun part.

But again, you have to work fast

because you want to keep this cold.

Cold is key.

I kind of like to use the croissant method

where you make a book fold.

The main point is that you're creating layer.

Take one side and fold it into the center.

Take the other side and fold it into the center

so that they're meeting in the middle.

Now I'm gonna fold it over onto itself.

So I have four layers here.

If I were in like a super fine dining restaurant,

maybe I would have to clean up the edges a little bit,

but I kind of like it like this.

I'm just gonna give it a little bit more flour

just to keep the butter from sticking.

And I'm going to rotate it

because now we're gonna roll it back into a rectangle

that was about the same size.

We're going for about 12 to 18 inches.

Doesn't have to be perfect. Don't worry.

Don't bust out the measuring tape.

The only real way to mess this up is to let it get too hot.

So if your kitchen is really hot, work a little faster,

and just pop it back in the fridge if you need to.

It's really coming together.

The buttermilk is hydrating all of the ingredients.

We're gonna do the fold one more time.

I can feel my dough getting soft,

which means it is getting a little bit warm.

So I'm gonna work pretty quickly here,

and this is gonna be the last time that I roll this out.

[hands thudding]

[parchment paper rustling]

So I'm just gonna flip it.

You see the front here, you can see the layers,

and there's more layers on the inside

that have just been rolled out.

This is really gonna help us get nice lift

and nice definition.

More folds mean more layers,

which means more flakiness in your biscuit,

but if you're sacrificing cold for layers,

it's not worth it.

I've really found that twice is kind of the sweet spot

between getting the lift and the layers that I want,

but also keeping the identity and integrity

of what a biscuit should be.

I have the dough in a square.

We don't need to do the rectangle again.

Lift this up, put it back on the tray,

and get it cold for about 20 minutes in the fridge

until we cut and bake.

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Booya. Look at that beautiful biscuit dough.

It is amazing.

You can use a biscuit cutter, you can use a glass.

However, a lot of them are not sharp enough,

so they pinch the dough as you're cutting down.

It won't let the dough rise.

It'll kind of like squish it down on the sides.

You also get waste cutting circles out of a square.

So I'm gonna cut this into about two inches

and I'm using a sharp knife

so that way, it doesn't pinch the dough.

It just goes straight down.

So I particularly love cutting my biscuits into squares

because I don't know about you,

but I love, like, the corners of lasagna.

I like all those crispy edges and the browning and all that.

So I like doing square biscuits

because you get those corners that are a little crunchier.

You get all the sides and everybody gets that goodness.

So transfer these beautiful biscuits

to a parchment line baking tray about an inch apart.

I want to keep this cold.

If they feel like they are warming up,

go ahead and pop them in the fridge or the freezer.

Take care of the rest of your biscuits

and then go ahead and bake.

We're starting at 425

and it's best if you have a convection oven to turn that on

because you really want the air to circulate

and be even so you don't get hotspots in your oven

where the butter melts on some,

but really puffs on the others.

Now we will get these in the oven.

Your biscuits should take about 20 minutes,

but if your oven is really powerful,

your convection fan is blowing like crazy,

it might be closer to 15 minutes, it might be longer to 25.

So just keep an eye on it.

When you start to smell them,

that's when you know you're getting close.

When they have that beautiful golden crust,

go ahead and pull 'em out.

One thing you do not want to do

is open your oven door to check.

The temperature dropping will stop that rising process

and it'll collapse.

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Bonus points.

We're gonna make a little bit of honey butter

to brush onto our biscuits.

Totally optional.

I'm using two tablespoons of butter,

about two tablespoons of honey.

Don't get me wrong, the biscuits are delicious on their own,

but adding the honey butter on top

gives it another, like, dimension of depth of flavor.

A sweetness to offset the saltiness.

This butter is just nice, soft at room temperature

and you can see they just stir together really nicely.

This is perfect.

You don't want it to be too cold

because you won't be able to get the brush in there

to get it on top of the biscuits,

and you don't want it to be too soft

because then it's melted and the fat

and the liquid in the butter separate.

So this is still fully emulsified, homogenous.

You'll get nice even coating on your biscuits.

This is exactly where you want it to be.

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The moment we have all been waiting for.

A lot of people will pull the biscuits

a little bit too early

while they're still a little bit blonde.

I like my biscuits to be just past that golden brown

and go a little bit deeper

because you're really getting more depth of flavor,

you're getting more caramelization,

you're getting crispier corners,

and you're also setting those layers in between.

So while they are still hot,

I'm gonna brush some of this honey butter on them

to kind of glaze the tops of these beautiful biscuits.

So on top of the honey butter,

just a little bit of flaky sea salt.

You get crunch from the salt.

You also get these little pops of salinity

that contrast so nicely

with the honey butter brushed on top.

This is how you show somebody you really care.

Okay, hurry up and cool down so I can eat you.

We are going to plate them.

How do you like that?

What if I gave you like a pyramid of biscuits,

would you be happy?

You could see how the bottom is not burned,

but it is deeply golden and crusty.

So we're gonna get a lot of texture from all of this

and a lot of flavor from everything that we put into it.

[biscuit crunching]

Oh, my God.

You get a little bit of the tang from the buttermilk,

You get sweetness.

You get a little bit of seasoned like saltiness

to balance that out.

But above all, you get this soft, fluffy interior

and this absolutely amazing crunch on the outside.

Making biscuits can seem a little daunting at first,

but it is very simple.

So if you just pay attention to the details

and a couple little tricks and tips

and just follow them,

you will have an amazing outcome every time.