The Secret to Homemade Flaky Layers Biscuits

A few weeks ago our church put on an event called Homespun University.  Volunteers taught classes on a topic they enjoyed and we could choose from a large variety of things to learn about including organization, home decor, self defense, cake decorating, herbs, essential oils, and scripture study. One of our members is a retired professional baker who owned his own bakery for years. He offered a class on biscuits and I jumped at the chance to learn from him.

Before I got married I baked a lot of biscuits, but they weren’t the best.  Sometimes they were hockey pucks.  It worried my husband so much that he begged his Aunt to have me over for a biscuit baking lesson.  Then I entered the fitness phase of my life and biscuits became a thing of the past.

Recently I started balancing real baked goods, with actual wheat flour into our rotation. Sometimes I’d rather have a tiny bit of a real treat than a full serving of a sugar free, grain free blech. It’s all about portion control and activity level to make it balance out in the end.
I bought the Magnolia Home cookbook (How does Joanna cook like this and stay so thin?) and excitedly tried her biscuit recipe.  It had way tooooooo much butter and they were just ok.

The recipe I’m about to share with you is better.  A lot better.  I tried it first with all-purpose white flour, but I’m going to try it again with my home ground fresh hard white whole wheat flour.

First here are the secrets:

  1. Use COLD butter.  Keep it in the fridge until just before using it.
  2. Don’t overwork your butter.  Cut it in until it’s the size of peas not fine crumbs.
  3. Don’t overwork your dough.  Kneading is for yeast breads, not biscuits. It’s ok to have some flour that isn’t worked in at the first.  As you lightly roll it into layers it will work in.
  4. Don’t roll the biscuits too flat.  There isn’t yeast in these so keep them tall, so don’t’ press out all the air that’s forming from the baking powder reaction.  I leave mine about 3/4 inch thick before cutting.
  5. Don’t twist the cutter.  Twisting the cutter seals the edges and keeps the biscuit from rising into layers.
  6. Brushing the tops with milk before baking, makes sure there won’t be a dry flour dust on your biscuits from the rolling flour.
  7. Use a HOT oven temperature.  This quickly seals the outside crust, trapping air inside and forcing a higher rise.

Flakey Layers Biscuits

3 cups All Purpose Flour

4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

10 Tbs Cold Butter

1 1/3 cups Cultured Buttermilk

2 Tbs Honey

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Makes 12 biscuits.

In a large bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Cut the butter into slices then add to the flour mixture and use a pastry cutter to work into the flour until the butter is the size of small peas.

In a glass measuring cup, beat together the buttermilk and honey.  Then pour into the flour mixture.  Stir just until it has mostly come together, then dump out onto a lightly floured counter.  Gather dough into a ball.

Dust a rolling pin with flour and with a light touch, roll the dough out about 1/2 inch thick. Fold the dough into thirds, then roll again and fold into thirds again.  Repeat one more time.  Lightly roll the dough about 3/4 inch thick, then cut with a biscuit cutter.  Instead of bunching up the scraps into a new ball to roll out again (which would destroy your layers and overwork the dough) slide them together on the counter and push bath together, keeping your layers intact to cut again.

Brush the tops with milk and bake for 8 minutes or until golden on top.

12 biscuits; 220 calories each, 10g fat, 26g net carbs, and 4g protein

Made with Hard White Whole Wheat Flour 218 calories, 10g fat, 24g net carbs, 5g protein

If you try it, let me know how it goes!  If you want to see it in action, let me know and I can do a facebook live video.

 

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6 thoughts on “The Secret to Homemade Flaky Layers Biscuits

  1. Dorese says:

    Thanks so much for sharing this! I recently tried Joanna’s southern biscuits after my friend bought her book and raved about that particular recipe. Like you did, I found them to be way too buttery and not what I was expecting. I’m so grateful you shared the extra tips about rolling them in layers and not twisting the cutter; I was aware not to overwork the dough and aim for pea-sized pieces of butter, but the other tips were new to me. YUM! I can’t wait to try these out!

  2. Debbie says:

    Thanks for sharing this. For what it’s worth, I have found that if I want to use whole wheat in lieu of all purpose flour hard white wheat works the best, golden prairie is a variety of hard white and works wonderfully.

    • Angela says:

      Yes! Debbie, I totally agree. I used to think whole wheat flour was bitter until Instarted grinding my own. It turns out most whole wheat flour on the shelf is old enough for the oils to go rancid.

  3. Stephanie Smith says:

    Angela, this is the best biscuit recipe ever! We made this for breakfast this morning, and Casey could not stop raving about how good these biscuits are. Thank you for sharing!

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