Butter-Flaky Biscuits

The principles of cooking are rooted in science, that much we cannot dispute. Yet there are a few ingredients out there that seem almost magical. Yes, we can dissect their physical properties and talk about how they accomplish different things when hot vs. when cold, how their proportion of fats, protein and sugars affect the results. Yada yada yada. 

But there's something else that anyone who cooks cannot dispute: butter is magical. It just is. It makes pretty much any dish better. Got a bland pasta? Elevate it with butter. Want to unify fish and its seasonings? Add butter. Want flaky, amazing-tasting pie crust? Use butter.

Butter is amazing ingredient not only because of what it can do physically but because it makes just about anything taste better. It's that special combination of fat, liquid and milk solids--the dairy bits that get left behind--that make it an amazing thing. You gotta be careful with butter: it burns faster than oils, goes rancid if left unrefrigerated and it can pick up other flavors if not stored right. But treat butter right and it's one of the most powerful weapons in the kitchen arsenal.

Layering butter is a key method of forming flakiness in pastries. It's what makes pie crust and croissants flaky, and it can work in your Thanksgiving biscuits too. 

The method here is similar to lamination: folding and rolling a butter-rich biscuit dough to multiply the layers of butter in the dough (with lamination additional butter is spread between the layers). As the dough is rolled out, the pieces of butter in the dough are elongated, and with each fold, the number of butter-layers doubles. Knowing that this could produce irresistibly flaky biscuits, I went in search of a recipe.

And I found this excellent one from Serious Eats by Melissa Sertich Velie. Here, the dough is shaped into a rectangle, then folded into thirds, rolled out again, and folded into third again. With each folding, the layers of butter in the dough are tripled. The results when baked are obvious, as the biscuits separate a bit on the side, revealing wonderful layers of buttery goodness. 

These biscuits were incredibly good. The perfect vessel for enjoying your favorite berry jam, a little apple butter or just swiping through the streaks of gravy on your Thanksgiving plate.

Butter-Flaky Biscuits
Adapted from Super Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits recipe by Melissa Sertich Velie for Serious Eats

3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 large egg
2 1/4 cups (13 ounces) all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/4 tsp. kosher salt
2 sticks (8 ounces) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes and kept refrigerated

1. In a small bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, cream and the egg.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the butter and toss the butter cubes until fully coated with flour. Working quickly, use your fingers to rub the butter into the flour to form marble-size pieces (alternatively, Velie suggests you could pulse the mixture 2 to 3 times in a food processor). Transfer butter-flour mixture to a large bowl.

3. Add the buttermilk mixture to the bowl and mix with a fork until just combined. The mixture will be quite clumpy (see photo above). Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator for 30 minutes.

4. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and, using your fingers, lightly press and fold the dough to bring it together into a large rectangle (avoid handling the dough roughly). Fold the dough into thirds (see photo above). Using a rolling pin, roll it out into roughly the size of the original rectangle, then fold it again. Roll the dough out to about 1/2-inch thickness. Chill the dough again in the refrigerator for another 10 minutes.

5. Preheat oven to 400 F.

6. Place the dough on the work surface. Using a 3-inch round cutter, cut out biscuits as close together as possible and place on a baking sheet about 1/2 inch apart. Gather remaining scraps and cut out more biscuits (Velie recommends discarding any remaining scraps, but I just formed them into a final biscuit, albeit a bit misshapen).

7. Bake until the biscuits rise and turn a light golden-brown, about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let the biscuits cool about 5 minutes on the baking sheet, then transfer to a wire rack to cool further. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Related

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Thanksgiving Central

Butter, Clarified

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to make clarified butter, just to have it on hand. I'd never done it before and it was an interesting process.

Clarified butter is useful for sautéing at high temperatures. Because butter is a dairy product, it contains solids that can burn, creating a bitter taste (these same solids, when cooked but not burned, create the nutty taste of browned butter). Clarified butter removes those solids, leaving only the oily component of butter. Thus, it is less flavorful than actual butter, but still butter-flavored.

Let's clarify something first (that won't get old), ghee and clarified butter are not the same thing. Ghee is a type of clarified butter common in India. It has a more concentrated flavor, since it is cooked longer, and is sometimes even herbed.

Since it keeps well for months, I decided to use a whole pound of butter. I put four cubes in a shallow saucepan over medium-low heat.

Gradually the butter melted and then began to bubble, with foam rising to the top, which I skimmed off. You can see in the picture above how even as the butter begins to clear you can see the layer of dairy solids and water as a layer on the bottom of the pan. Eventually, much of the moisture bubbles to the surface, but the solids remain on the bottom to be strained out.

Eventually, the foaming subsided, with some of the dairy solids clinging to the bottom of the pan. By filtering the butter with several layers of cheesecloth over a strainer, I separated the solids from the golden oily product that was the goal of exercise.

The clarified butter solidified in the refrigerator, waiting for me to use it. Now I just need to find some dishes to use it in.