Apple Cider Buttermilk Biscuits

This is the recipe that started this whole project. Growing up, the only biscuits my family ever made were from a mix. The same mix we used for pancakes and waffles. The biscuits weren't bad, but they lacked most of the things that make biscuits biscuits. These weren't particularly fresh, or flaky, and they just kind of tasted like warm dough with melted butter on them.

These, on the other hand, are everything a biscuit should be. Packed with flavor, and flaky as all get out. They don't take much more active time than biscuits from a mix, but you do need to start them several hours before. Biscuit dough is similar to pie dough in both the ratios of ingredients, and how it's handled.

Ingredients:

2 cups of all purpose flour

1 tsp of salt

2 tsp baking powder

6 tbsp butter 

3 oz buttermilk

3 oz apple cider

Start by mixing the dry ingredients: flour, salt, and baking powder. Cut up butter into 1/4 inch chunks and start pushing it into the dough. You're aiming for popcorn kernel sized lumps of butter and dough. Lumps which are incredibly difficult to photograph.

Add the milk and cider and stir until everything comes together. Then roll the dough out to 4"x6" and wrap it up in saran wrap, then let it chill for an hour in the refrigerator. If you overwork the dough, without letting it chill, it will become tough and not at all flaky (just like overworked pie dough).

Once the dough has chilled, take it out, and fold it into thirds, then roll it back out to 4x6, and chill it for at least another hour. This, once repeated two more times, is going to give you lots and lots of flaky layers. Twenty-seven flaky layers, to be precise. 

Once you're ready to bake it, pre-heat the oven to 400 F. Take the dough, and either use a biscuit cutter, or just take a knife and slice off the ends of the dough, before cutting out the biscuits.

If you don't cut the ends off, the biscuits are going to flop open like a book when you cook them. Even at this stage, you can see all the layers in the biscuits. Please, try to refrain from eating them now. They're much better cooked.

Bake the biscuits for 20 minutes, and then try to wait until they cool off a little before buttering them and eating. The apple flavor is subtle, but there.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

This recipe looks great! Would you consider providing a no-photo printer-friendly version of your recipes?

[Ben]

That's a great idea, thanks. We'll look in to how to do that automatically with each post.

[LSS]

Sure, just throw your family under the bus...
Notwithstanding that, I won't make public the butternut squash story.