buttermilk biscuits

These biscuits always turn out and they taste about 200 times better than any biscuits you can buy. They're definitely worth it to make at home. You can mix it together with a fork and a pastry blender (to cut in the butter), but I like to use my food processor.

Making light, flaky biscuits depends on using cold butter, and the method of mixing them. If you use a food processor, you don't want the butter to be completely blitzed to smithereens. There should be some pieces about the size of peas, and some smaller pieces - "coarse crumbs" as most recipes will say. When they bake in a really hot oven, those irregular sized pieces of butter will create moist little pockets of steam inside the biscuits as they rise and bake, which create the flaky texture. I read this in a cookbook somewhere a long time ago...seems to make sense. So if you use a food processor, be careful not to over-process the dough or your biscuits will turn out flat. And nobody likes flat biscuits.

(Speaking of flat biscuits, I once made these with a stone-ground flour that I got from a local mill. They didn't rise. At all. They were hard and dry and pretty awful...and my husband ate them anyway. What a guy.)

We eat these biscuits a lot in the winter with chili and stews. My kids love them for breakfast, warmed for a minute in the toaster and spread with butter and a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar.

Buttermilk Biscuits
(adapted from Better Homes and Gardens)


3 cups flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cream of tartar
3/4 cup cold butter, cubed
1 1/4 cups buttermilk (or 1 cup regular milk if you don't have buttermilk)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. In the bowl of a food processor, combine the flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and cream of tartar. Process until well mixed. 


Add the cold butter cubes. Pulse a few times, just until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs with some pea-sized pieces. Add the milk and pulse a few more times, just until the dough forms a rough ball.


Turn out the dough onto a floured surface. Gently knead the dough by folding and pressing it about 4-5 times. Lightly roll out the dough to about 1 inch thick. With a round cookie cutter or a juice glass, cut rounds about 2 1/2 inches in diameter. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for about 10-12 minutes or until biscuits are golden on top.