When most of us think of the taste and texture of the ideal biscuit, we picture something golden, buttery, and flaky, leavened with baking powder or baking soda (although you can make biscuits with sourdough as well).
Biscuits were the classic American bread for much of US history, more so than leavened loaves, in part because they’re easier and quicker to make. Biscuit recipes often call for buttermilk, which is slightly tart and lends bright acidity to the flavor. Still, buttermilk isn’t a very common ingredient these days, and for years I wondered why it was so central to biscuit making. Then, as a result of a recent foray into making my own cultured butter and crème fraîche, a possible answer came to me. Butter is made from cream, which is poured off from the milk and churned. The liquid that remains after churning is traditional buttermilk. (The commercial buttermilk sold these days is quite different, being made by culturing nonfat or low-fat milk with lactic acid bacteria.) In the past, dairy farmers who made their own butter always had traditional buttermilk on hand. If you were to take 1 quart (1 L) of old-fashioned (not homogenized) whole milk, pour off the cream, and churn it, you would end up with almost exactly the same proportions of milk, butter, and buttermilk called for in classic biscuit recipes. If you look at it that way, it could be a recipe that almost invented itself.
As for my biscuit-making technique, my grandmother Georgia Coy definitely got me started. Her way with butter and flour was masterful. She always used very cold butter and also chilled her flour. She would cut the butter into cubes, then pinch it by hand into the cold flour. Whew! Glad I got that in there. No self-respecting chef or baker would ever write a cookbook without a shout-out to Grandma.