Golden Buttermilk Biscuits

Why This Golden Buttermilk Biscuits Works

Cold butter and hot oven heat do most of the work here. When the small butter cubes are rubbed into the flour, they stay in little pieces instead of melting. Those bits of butter are coated in flour and spread all through the dough. In the oven, the butter pieces melt fast and leave tiny gaps where they were. Those gaps act like little air pockets, so the biscuits bake up light instead of dense.

At the same time, the buttermilk and baking soda react as soon as they meet. Tiny bubbles start forming in the dough. With the high oven heat, those bubbles expand quickly before the dough sets, which gives the biscuits a good rise. Baking powder adds even more lift as it warms up.

Inside, the dough stays soft because the fat from the butter coats the flour and keeps it from soaking up all the liquid. On the outside, the hot oven dries and browns the surface, so the biscuits come out golden with a tender middle.

Mistakes To Avoid

Letting the butter warm up too much before it goes into the flour makes the biscuits come out flat and greasy. Instead of little cold bits of butter melting in the oven and creating steam pockets, the butter just blends into the flour and the dough bakes up dense with very little lift.

Overmixing the dough after the buttermilk goes in quickly turns the biscuits tough. The more the dough is stirred and kneaded, the more the gluten tightens, so the biscuits bake up chewy and bready instead of soft and tender.

Rolling the dough too thin means the biscuits don’t have enough height to rise properly. In the oven they cook through very fast, dry out, and end up more like crisp crackers than fluffy biscuits.

Starting with a cooler oven than 450°F keeps the biscuits from puffing. The butter melts slowly instead of bursting into steam, so the biscuits spread out, stay pale, and bake up heavy in the center.