I did not grow up in biscuit country. The totality of my pre-20s biscuit experience in the Northeast came in the form of Popeyes sides, Pillsbury Grands and McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches. (I still have a soft spot for those odd folded egg patties.)
Since then, I’ve been schooled on all manner of biscuits, ranging from light as a cloud and fluffy to intensely crisp and flaky. With this new recipe, I aimed to straddle that divide, yielding a biscuit with crisp edges, flaky layers and a soft, buttery internal crumb structure.
Nearly every biscuit recipe starts with combining flour, baking powder or soda, salt and possibly sugar in various ratios. Next, butter is added and worked into the dry ingredients. Finally, liquid ingredients — typically buttermilk, heavy cream, milk, eggs or a combination thereof — are added, and the whole mixture is very lightly kneaded before shaping and baking.
The way that butter is incorporated can have a huge impact on texture. If the butter gets too soft, it will coat individual grains and pockets of flour, preventing gluten from forming and resulting in biscuits that lack structure and bake up dense. Butter that’s left in discrete, unmelted chunks will steam as the biscuits bake, giving you a firmer crumb with buttery nooks and crannies.
The difficulty is that with most common methods, such as cubing the butter and working it in with your fingertips or a pastry cutter, it can be hard to sufficiently work in the butter to provide uniform lift and flavor without overworking it and producing dense biscuits.
Years ago, while working on a blueberry scone recipe for Cook’s Illustrated magazine, I landed on the method of freezing sticks of butter and grating them on the large holes of a box grater. This gives you very thin, uniform shavings of butter that can easily be tossed with the flour mixture. It worked then and it still works now.
For my liquid ingredients for these biscuits, I experimented with buttermilk, heavy cream and a mixture of sour cream and whole milk (the combination I had used for those blueberry scones). It wasn’t until I found myself baking a batch of biscuits in the middle of the night that I decided to try using a big dollop of the Greek yogurt we keep in the refrigerator for our toddler, thinning the yogurt with milk. This batch of biscuits came out tangier and more full-flavored than any of the previous batches I’d made, with the convenience of ingredients I always have in the fridge.
The thickness of Greek yogurt (even when it’s cut with some milk, it’s significantly thicker than buttermilk) also helps produce an easily workable dough without introducing excess moisture, which can lead to tougher, denser biscuits.
The way biscuits are shaped also has an impact on texture. Simply rolling the dough and cutting it with a biscuit cutter or knife results in uniform biscuits with poofy sides that can be crisp or fluffy, depending on whether you space the biscuits on a baking sheet, or pack them together in a pan.
What if you want some flaky layers built into them? Easy: Roll the dough out into a large square, fold both sides across the center like a business letter, then fold the top and bottom across the center before rolling it again. Doing this once creates nine layers. Do it twice and you get 27; three times you get 81.
But there’s a trade-off: Each time you fold and re-roll the dough, you are developing more gluten. And so with each additional layer of folds, your biscuits gain flakiness, while simultaneously becoming tougher and denser.
What if you want your biscuits both flaky and light? In that old blueberry scone recipe, I ran into a related problem: How do you incorporate fresh blueberries without overworking your dough? The solution was to give the dough a single set of folds, re-roll it into a square, sprinkle the blueberries on top, then roll the whole thing up like a jellyroll.
I quickly realized if you remove the blueberries from the equation, you can roll that square of dough up much tighter, with each half-roll adding an extra set of layers to the finished biscuits. (This is, in fact, how Chinese scallion pancakes get their flaky layers.) To shape the biscuits, I gently flattened the roll of dough with the palms of my hands into a rectangle, cut that rectangle into four squares, then cut each square into two triangles before baking them.
Some folks might raise an eyebrow at the mention of triangular biscuits. Those same folks will raise both eyebrows when they see how those biscuits, the dough hinged along a single edge of the triangle, puff and fan into an array of flaky layers while maintaining a light, fluffy interior texture. I did not grow up in biscuit country, but I do believe I’ve found my way there.
Recipe: Flaky Folded Biscuits
