Cookbook Club – The Food Lab

Our cookbook for May was The Food Lab by J. Kenzi Lopez-Alt. This cookbook is all about the science behind the best techniques that the home cook can use. You can experience our whole experiment in a meal on my Cookbook Club site – for now, my dish!

Biscuits are delicious. You see people serving homemade biscuits in movies and tv shows all the time, so they seem like something a home cook should know how to make. But despite doing a fair amount of cooking, I’d never made biscuits. I decided this was a good opportunity to change that when I saw the recipe for Super-Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits.

I whisked buttermilk and sour cream together.

I combined flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a food processor, then pulsed cold 1/4-inch pats of butter into the mixture.

I added the buttermilk mixture to the flour mixture, kneaded just until it came together, and rolled the dough into a 12-inch square.

I folded the right third of the dough over the center, then folded the left third over. I folded the top third down, then the bottom third up. Then I rolled it all back out to a 12-inch square. And I repeated the whole process again.

I cut the dough into rounds, brushed the tops with melted butter, and baked them at 425 degrees F until golden.

They seemed really thin when I put them in the oven, but I’d never made biscuits before so I hoped they’d rise a lot. They did rise some, but not nearly enough. I ended up with fairly flat biscuits.

I think I rolled the biscuits too thin and that may have impacted the flakiness, but I also didn’t find these biscuits to be particularly tasty. My takeaway from this is that home-making biscuits is not worth all the effort when a batch of biscuits baked from one of those pop-open cans is just as good!