Buttermilk Biscuits: The Bread That Forgives You

Nobody learns to make biscuits from a recipe. They learn from a grandmother, or an aunt, or the back of a flour bag, and then they spend the next thirty years unlearning whatever was wrong with the way they were taught.

That is the secret of the Southern biscuit. It is the plainest bread there is, a handful of things you already own, and it is also the one most likely to humble you. A pie you can fix. A cake you can frost over. A bad biscuit just sits there, pale and dense, telling on you.

The fear is overblown, though, and the biscuit is more forgiving than its reputation. It forgives a heavy hand if your oven is hot enough. It forgives a slightly-off ratio if your buttermilk is good and cold. What it will not forgive is fuss. Biscuits are made by people in a hurry, which is why they survived. They are weekday bread, not occasion bread, mixed in the time it takes the oven to heat and on the table before the eggs are done.

When they come out right, you will know before you taste one. The tops go a freckled gold and the sides pull apart in soft pages, and when you split one open the steam comes off it carrying the faint tang of the buttermilk, and you understand why people have been getting up early to do this for two hundred years.

The trick everyone eventually learns, and that no recipe says plainly, is to leave the dough alone. Touch it as little as you can stand to. The less you work it, the more it works for you.

Make these on a Tuesday.

Cast-Iron Buttermilk Biscuits

Yields about 10 biscuits.

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter, very cold
2 tablespoons Crisco, very cold
1 cup whole buttermilk
2/3 cup heavy cream

For shaping

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons butter, melted

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 425°F and butter a cast-iron skillet.
Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
Grate or chop the cold butter and Crisco as small as you can, then toss them through the dry mix until evenly scattered. Keeping them cold is the whole secret to a tall biscuit.
Pour in the buttermilk and heavy cream and stir just until the dough looks like cottage cheese. Stop there. Overmixing is how biscuits go tough.
Spoon out a small handful, no bigger than your palm, and toss it in the shaping flour to shape it into a rough round.
Set each biscuit in the buttered skillet, sides just touching, and repeat with the rest of the dough.
Bake about 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown.
Pull the skillet from the oven and pour the melted butter straight over the tops while everything is still hot.

Make-ahead note: this dough freezes beautifully, so consider a double batch to use up the buttermilk. Bake what you need, then freeze the extra shaped biscuits on a parchment-lined pan for a few hours before moving them to a gallon freezer bag. From frozen, bake at 425°F for 20 to 25 minutes.