Simple Homestyle Biscuits

Can I start by admitting it took YEARS for me to make a decent biscuit? I mean when it’s flooded with amazing sausage gravy you tend to forgive a subpar biscuit. But biscuits and gravy with super tender and crumbly biscuits? Whoa…

Wanna know the best part about these biscuits? They’re super simple to make! Only about 10 mins to put together and another 20 in the oven and they’re ready to go.

You’ll start by mixing all the dry ingredients together. I use my stand mixer but you can just toss them all in a large mixing bowl. Next we add our fats. I use half butter and half vegetable shortening. All butter or coconut oil instead of shortening or even lard if you have it will work too. Butter should be cold and cut into tiny pea size cubes.

Bonus tip : I like to use the whisk attachment or even a hand whisk to mix in my fats. It works just as well as a pastry cutter. Just be sure to clean out the inside of the whisk as butter and shortening build up on the inside. You should end up with a bowl of flour that looks like the top right picture in the collage below.

You’ll want to switch to your dough hook attachment if using a stand mixer or a large spoon if hand mixing. Slowly add your milk until the dough comes together. The large picture in the collage is what it looked like after I added all my milk. The lower right is what the dough looked like after I let it come together for a minute. If your dough isn’t coming together add a spoonful of milk at a time until it’s workable.

Lightly dust your work surface with flour. (I usually find some dry flour at the bottom of my mixing bowl and just use that!) Knead your biscuit dough once or twice to form a ball and flatten out into a rectangle about an inch thick. You could use a rolling pin but I just tamp it down with my palm. Usually I fold over my rectangle and reflatten a few times to help create layers but it isn’t necessary.

Don’t work the dough more than a minute or so in all. Overworking can both melt the butter pieces and develop the gluten in the flour. (Exactly what you don’t want for a tender biscuit) Flatten your dough out to about an inch thick when you’re ready to cut the biscuits out.

You can use a biscuit or cookie cutter, a cup or even a mason jar lid. Though I always end up with an impression because my lid is shallower than my dough, but that doesn’t affect the taste at all. You could even cut the dough into squares with a knife if you like.

I always use the dough left after cutting and rework it and cut more biscuits until I have no dough left. The tiny ball next to my Rae Dunn biscuit cutting cup is what I ended up throwing out.

Arrange your biscuits on a cast iron skillet or a parchment lined or greased baking sheet and bake at 425 for 20 mins. I use a cold (or room temp) cast iron pan in the middle rack position in my oven and get perfectly golden tops and bottoms but you may have to adjust where and what you use to suit your oven.

You can brush the tops with butter when they get out of the oven. I don’t. But you can. You could also add herbs or anything else you like to flavor these depending on what you’ll be serving them with. May I suggest chopped rosemary?