Not Healthy: Flaky Biscuit Recipe

Biscuits are delicious. If you don't agree, well, I don't know what to tell you. You're just wrong. One reason why you might not love biscuits is that you grew up eating those weird biscuits that come out of a tube at the grocery store that you can peel apart by the layers and they look, feel and taste like pressed layers of gummy dough into something that is supposed to resemble a biscuit. That is not a biscuit. A biscuit should have a flaky golden crust hiding a moist but flaky interior that begs for a generous helping of gravy.

Although biscuits are not difficult to make I have been served terrible excuses for biscuits, whether they oozed out of a store-bough tube or came out of an alleged homemade recipe. I am at a real loss for why people buy tubes of pre-made biscuits or follow terrible recipes that produce painfully dense pucks of baked flour or soggy...whatever they are. Biscuits are just not that difficult. This recipe is incredibly easy and is nearly failure-proof.

Flaky Biscuit Recipe

Servings: 6 biscuits
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 10 minutes

Equipment:

• Oven
• Baking sheet
• Mixing bowl
• Kitchen utensils, measuring cups and spoons
• One drinking glass
• Knife
• Whisk
• Rolling pin
• Spatula (optional)

Ingredients:

• Cooking spray
• 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour (plus extra for dusting work space)
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 4 tsp baking powder
• 1/3 cup butter
• 1 cup milk

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 450F.
2. Add flour, salt, sugar and baking powder to mixing bowl. Mix with whisk to evenly mix dry ingredients.
3. Cut butter into small pieces and add to mixing bowl. Mix with whisk for a few minutes until butter starts to break up into smaller pieces in the mix.
4. Add milk and mix gently until milk is loosely mixed into the mixture. Use a spatula or the whisk to incorporate any dry ingredients on the sides of the bowl.
5. Continue mixing until it forms into a dough of even consistency.
6. Lightly dust counter space and move dough onto floured work space. 
7. Roll out dough to 1/2 inches thick. 
8. Lightly spray baking pan with cooking spray (optional). 
9. Using the mouth of a drinking glass cut biscuits and transfer to baking sheet. Once you have cut as many biscuits as you can, combine the remaining dough into a ball and roll back out and try to cut additional biscuits. Whatever is left that you cannot cut should be rolled out into a poorly shaped but still tasty biscuit. 
10. Make sure all biscuits are on the baking pan and bake at 450F for 8-10 minutes until fully risen. The bigger the biscuit circumference the longer you want to bake them.

Options & Suggestions:

• You can use buttermilk in place of regular milk to create buttermilk biscuits. Keep everything else in the recipe the same.
• People disagree on the fat content of the milk needed to make biscuits. I routinely use skim milk but others swear by a fattier milk. More fat will make the biscuits more buttery and moist while less fat will make them more dense and crumbly. I usually make mine with gravy so I don't need the extra moisture or buttery character from the milk. 
• The size of the mouth of the glass you use to cut the biscuits out of the rolled dough will determine how many biscuits you make. Obviously, the smaller the mouth on the glass the more biscuits you can make. A shaker pint glass will make biscuits about the size of what you usually get at restaurants. Smaller biscuits will still fluff up just as well but you will want to bake them closer to eight minutes rather than a full ten minutes so they don't dry out.
• Biscuits are best right out of the oven but they will last for several days before they get too dried out. Consider reheating in the oven (or a toaster oven if you have one) rather than microwaving them, which will make them a soggy mess.