Buttermilk Biscuits Revisited

The last time we wrote about buttermilk, we had only just begun to warm to the stuff. We regarded it as a nuisance, a leftover that wouldn't go away, and we were mainly concerned with finding ways to get rid of it. But over the passing months, buttermilk has become a staple in our kitchen: we buy it even if we don't need it and our fridge looks a little bare and sad without it.

Buttermilk is so named because traditionally, it was just that, the milk leftover after butter was made. These days, the buttermilk we find in stores is actually cultured buttermilk--a product that has nothing to do with real buttermilk, but mimics its sour taste. Like yoghurt, cultured buttermilk is made by introducing live cultures to regular old milk, causing the milk to thicken and become slightly acidic.

Now, we’ve always felt blasé about buttermilk biscuits, but we’ll concede that we’ve probably just never had a good one; the tough, leaden “biscuits” that we’ve encountered surely can’t be what stirs up such a misty-eyed fuss in others.

When we looked at traditional buttermilk biscuit recipes, we started to see the problem. Most recipes call for kneading the dough for at least a minute or so (at least Edna Lewis, Fannie Farmer and the Joy of Cooking do). Maybe this is traditional, but it certainly wasn’t going to produce the light, tender biscuits that we were after. This kneading business would have to be eradicated.

Yesterday was probably not the day to start making buttermilk biscuits. We were sick. Achy, feverish, coughing sick. And we really were planning stick to our sicktime lunch of Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese, but then we remembered a recipe from Saveur that had been lingering in our brain: buttermilk biscuits with chives and cheddar cheese.

Serendipitously, we had a carton of buttermilk on hand, chives in the windowsill that were growing tall and droopy, and just enough sharp cheddar cheese. When ingredients and a recipe cosmically collide like this, sickness can’t stand in the way.

We set to work making our biscuits, barely bothering to read the instructions (which we read later, and are quite good) and focused on our new plan, to treat this dough carefully, as pastry, rather than manhandling it like bread. The one minor concession we made to the kneading was to roll the dough out once and fold it on itself to create more layers and thus, more height. The biscuits were terrific. Tall and airy, with easy-to-pull-apart layers and just the right balance of salty and sweet. They complemented our soup perfectly. What’s more, they were completed in a little less than 30 minutes. This morning, we made a plain version that was also delicious, and superb with homemade blackberry jelly.

We’re sure that these biscuits will offend devotees of more traditional methods, but we’re willing to risk it. These biscuits might not be authentic, but they are really, really good.

The recipe is after the break.

Photo by Rachael Coyle