World Famous Buttermilk Biscuits by Brian Hart Hoffman

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. 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. At 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 in 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 lily 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. I 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 pea-sized pieces using a pastry blender and that's going to coat the butter in 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 stir 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 it 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'll 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 a 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 I'm just going to 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 but 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 knead 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 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 quarter 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 roll out or final pat out 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 be sure to put a little flour 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 dough 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 you're 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 those 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 perfectly golden brown biscuit when these come out of the oven. Then after your egg wash we're going to finish it 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 degree 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 is warm from the oven wait till you see it. Oh y'all we've 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 then look 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 it 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 gonna love them. Can't wait to see you next time.