Midway Bakery Biscuit Tips
For the Tenderest, Tastiest Buttermilk Biscuits!
photography by Talitha Schroeder
Here are a few insider tips from the folks who’ve been making our buttermilk biscuits for nearly 15 years. You can find the recipe, which originated at Holly Hill Inn, in the first few pages of Chef Ouita’s cookbook, Just a Few Miles South.
The big thing to keep in mind when making biscuits is to preserve the butter. It’s the whole butter pieces in your dough that are responsible for the layers in your biscuits. Here’s how to achieve those coveted layers –
Grating frozen butter
We always keep a few pounds (or sticks) of butter in the freezer to help with this step. Before grating, toss the stick(s) of butter with your flour to give you a better handle, then grate the butter on the large holes of a box grater. When you get down to the end of the butter, hold it with the palm of your hand and grate carefully, your knuckles are more likely to get dinged than your palm.
Mixing with a “light hand”
Stop adding buttermilk as soon as the dough comes together; you may need a little more or less than the recipe calls for. You don’t want to over mix it and lose those lovely frozen bits of butter.
Make square so you don’t have to refold
Roll (or pat out) your dough to a rough rectangle and cut it into squares. When cut into rounds, there's always a bit of dough that has to be remixed which compromises the light hand you just used! Plus square biscuits make better sandwiches!
Freezing after forming to resolidify the butter
Once they’re cut, freeze your biscuits flat on a baking sheet, and bake at will! You can also relocate the biscuits to a freezer bag for longer storage, and pull out only as many as you want to bake at a time.
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