Delicious Homemade Cheddar Biscuits with Claire Saffitz | Dessert Person

[Music] hi everyone I'm Claire saffitz welcome to my home kitchen today we are back from our Austin Road Trip where we had so much fun and I'm here to show you more recipes from my kitchen today I'm making a Cheesy yeasted biscuit it's this recipe that I've been playing around with for a while and it kind of splits a difference between like a fluffy dinner roll and a flaky buttermilk biscuit they're so delicious I'm going to flavor the butter with some spices I'm very excited to show you how to make [Music] them [Music] there are a million different kinds of biscuits and there is actually a particular style of biscuit that is yeast raised rather than like baking soda or baking powder so they're called angel biscuits this is kind of a variation on an angel biscuit but I'm going to do an extra step where I do something called laminating and basically it's a technique where you take I incorporate butter in a big block and roll it out and fold it and it creates all of these even layers separated by like thin sheets of butter so if you've seen like our puff pastry episode same technique and so they're so buttery but also like really light and Airy and so delicious so the ingredients and these are cheesy biscuits so I'm incor incorporating grated cheese into the dough itself so I'm starting with all-purpose flour I I have a stick and a half of butter some of it's cut into pieces cuz that goes into the dough the stick of butter is used for lamination some sugar kosher salt instant yeast a mixture of spices dried dill Cayenne onion powder a one clove of fresh garlic 7 oz of sharp cheddar and buttermilk in terms of special equipment I do everything by hand you'll just need like a rolling pin a bench scraper a box grater like super basic stuff that I'm sure you already have it home before I get into the recipe I want to thank our friends at car gold for sponsoring the episode as you know Cary gold are the makers of superior butter and cheese products all of their products are made from milk from Irish grass-fed cows raised on small Family Farms I love using all Cary gold products not only for the superior flavor but also because they're free of preservatives and I especially love the reserve cheddar which has aged for 2 years it's like extremely sharp but also creamy and smooth and it's just going to be so good in my cheesy cheddar biscuits and of course the butter both unsalted and salted is a staple in our house I use the butter and all of my baking to make like incredibly buttery delicious baked goods like croissants Pi dough these biscuits anything where I want a really pronounced butter flavor and I'm also going to use the reserve cheddar they make an entire cheese line I love the cheddar because it's sort of delightfully sharp but still smooth and creamy it ages for 2 years also made from the milk from grass-fed Irish cows car gold products are home run all around you can find the products in most major grocery stores but also check out the website below for more info and now I'm going to get back into the recipe so the first step in making the biscuit recipe is to bring together the dough it's really really straightforward and easy I'm starting with three cups of allpurpose flour I'm adding a couple of tablespoons of sugar the sugar doesn't make it sweet it's just there to like bring out the flavor of the other ingredients and also encourage Browning so they get like really toasty and golden in the oven Coast your salt two teaspoons I'm using diamond crystal and if you're using Morton at home Morton is denser so you use like about half that then I'm going to add my yeast this is instant yeast it's um 1 and 1/2 teaspoons often like I go back and forth between instant yeast and active dry in my recipes a lot of it is just like what I have at home you could use active dry you would just want to dissolve it in like 2 tablespoons of warm water first but instant yeast I like because you can just add it directly to your dry ingredients okay so then I'm going to add this is a half a stick or 4 tablespoons of butter that I cut into little pieces so I'm going to add this in and this basically starts the way like a lot of sort of Buttermilk Biscuits start where I'm going to smash the butter in I'm just using less butter than I normally would because of course we're going to add a bunch of butter when I add the butter block and laminate it in so I'm just kind of tossing everything together the butter is I mean I chilled it but it's been out of the fridge for a little bit while we set up so it's like it's definitely not softened it's slightly tempered but you just don't want it to be room temp you want it to be cold enough enough that it kind of holds its shape and that's only because you don't want to stick to your fingers when you're doing this but it's not really precise all you want to do is really work the butter in and smash it with your fingertips to break it down into like little tiny pieces you want to go until the largest pieces of butter are maybe like lentil sized but generally you want it to be almost like so worked in that you can't even really see any more butter pieces it's not that important or precise but it does have kind of like a tenderizing effect on the dough so that's why I like to add just this little bit of fat to the dough itself and then l in the butter block so now that I have the butter almost entirely worked into the flour mixture I'm going to grate in my cheese you can use any kind of cheddar that you want I like a sharp cheddar I wouldn't use the pregrated stuff cuz generally like the stuff that comes in the block is a lot fresher and of course I'm using Cary gold Reserve age cheddar which has such great complexity of flavor so I'm just grating it in on the large holes of the Box grater what was that Pro trick you just did oh that I coated in the FL that's kind of instinctual cuz it's like if you're I do a lot of recipes where I grate butter in this way Frozen butter and coating it in flour just helps to prevent the pieces from sticking together but this is cheddar so it's not really going to Clump a whole lot oh so this is a 7 oz block you could do six you could do a little less I wouldn't go more than seven though because once you start adding a lot of cheese it does tend to weigh down the dough quite a bit I love aged shedar cuz I love when it has like those little crystals in it like the way that an aged parm does I love the sharpness I like all my food to have some amount of like acid in it so I love that it's like has that sharp flavor okay so here you see I have all my little cheese shreds so now I'm ready to add my liquid I am using buttermilk again cuz I'm trying to kind of like make this almost hybrid style of like flaky buttermilk biscuit but yeasted so it's also really like light and fluffy like a roll like bread so I'm just tossing through all of that cheese so I'm going to make a little bit of a well in the center you want your buttermilk to be room temp that is going to help the yeast to kind of activate if it were cold it's just going to really slow things down a lot so the proof is going to take longer so room temp buttermilk and actually commercial yeast like this likes a slightly acidic environment so the uh the buttermilk and the yeast go well together so now I'm going to bring together the dough anytime I have like liquid like this and flour I like to use any kind of tool like a spatula or a bowl scraper like this to help me bring it together because as soon as your hands hit the liquid and then hit the flour they become coated and sticky so it's just easier to bring this together like this you could put it in a sand mixer but it's so easy and like you don't really need to work it so I think it's just better to do it all by hand so in the bowl I want to just mix it until all of the buttermilk is absorbed but it's going to be really uneven in texture with some really wet spots and some dry spots but as soon as it forms kind of a Shaggy dough I'm going to turn it out onto my work surface you can see like the wet spots and all that those dry little flowery bits so I want to get everything out and now I'm just going to continue to work this on the surface kind of Folding It kneading it and bringing it together the goal here I'm not trying to like develop gluten the way that I would if I were making like a bread recipe I just want to work it into until all the flour is evenly hydrated and I have like a pretty evenly mixed dough so make sure you're incorporating all those little dry bits and what you're looking for is the flour to be completely hydrated so it will be a little bit sticky in places but firm enough basically it'll feel like dough so that's it that's all I really need to work it use scraper to clean off your hands and then just kind of form it into a ball so now we're ready to let the dough do its first rise so I'm going to put this back into the mixing bowl that I used for putting it together I'm going to just clean it out a little bit cover it set it out of room temp we're going to wait until it's like between 50% and 100% expanded in [Music] size while we're waiting for the DOTA Riz I'm going to put together my seasoned butter I keep referring to the process of lamination and calling it a butter block but I'm not actually going to incorporate the butter in a block block the way that you would if you were making like traditional croissants or puff pastry I'm going to kind of like spread it onto the dough it's just easier like a little more low-key more appropriate for a biscuit recipe like this but I thought why not take the opportunity to season it and like increase the amount of flavor in the biscuits and while you could add a lot of these ingredients to the dough something very specific happens which is the the spices that I'm going to add and the garlic kind of like Sizzle and fry in the butter as it's baking in the oven and so just like create it's more of that flavor that I want so I have one stick of butter 4 oz I'm going to add a couple of dried spices I have some onion powder some cayenne and some dried dill which is something I really like I'm kind of going for the flavors of like Ranch it's going to go so well with the cheddar and like the buttermilk flavor and that kind of tanginess so that's going to go in then I have a garlic clove I love raw garlic flavor Harrison I were just talking about how it's kind of like the key to everything so I'm going to do some raw garlic in here and it kind of half Cooks in the oven but it still retains a little bit of that sharpness of raw so I really like it I just don't need the whole thing if you have a small clove you can do the whole thing this is more like medium large that is going to go in I didn't have these ingredients out in the beginning but I am going to add a little salt and pepper now I just want to work this the butter is room temp so it's really soft and spreadable and I just want to work this with a flexible spatula until it's very evenly mixed okay so it already smells so good so it's like an herb butter yeah and I love seeing the flex of the dried dill and I love seeing it like through the layers and the biscuits also all right so this is now very evenly mixed you can see a little bit of the red specs of a Cayenne too so I have a small offset spatula here this is going to help me spread the butter across the surface of the dough so now I also made a swap of the dough a little bit earlier and it's been rising off to the side so I'm going to check it and see if we're ready to move on to the next phase which is rolling at the dough and incorporating the butter okay so this is the dough when I poke it do you see how it Springs back it's a little bit harder to gauge the like how much it's really grown in size but when I poke it and it Springs back I can feel that there's lots of air in there so I think we're good to go and move on to the next step so for rolling it out I have my rolling pin I'll need a little bit of bench flour just to prevent sticking so I'm going to turn out the dough you can see that underside of the dough that was in contact with the bowl has like lots of little air bubbles so it has been rising I'm going to get a little flower underneath it Little Flower over top and I'm just going to use my fingertips and the heel of my hand to just flatten it and get it worked into a little bit of like a square SL rectangular shape that's really what we want and I like to give it sort of a tug at what I want to become the corners because anytime time you have dough in like a ball it really wants to stay in that kind of rounded orientation so it can be a little tricky for beginners to get something into that rectangular shape that you want so now I'm going to continue to roll it out I'm going to give it a little bit more flower and then flip it over to prevent sticking the dough at this stage it's kind of in that like in between phase of tacky and sticky I'm just going to flip it over give a little more flower on this side and I'll roll it out so this part isn't that precise really what you're going for is a thickness and a rectangular shape and beyond that like the dimensions aren't that important as I said the lamination itself is like a little bit of a cheaters lamination I want to roll it out until it's about like I I hate giving this measurement because it's so annoying but like 38 of an inch which is just somewhere between a qu and a/ in just that's all you have to really pay attention to if you need to dust a little more flower underneath if you feel like get sticking okay so now the next step is getting the butter enclosed in the dough so I'm going to take my butter mixture and I'm going to dollop it B around the bottom 2/3 of the dough so you see I have it in this long orientation thinking about it lengthwise I'm going to go the bottom 2/3 so this is like the top 2/3 so imagine a line right there this is the middle this is the bottom third maybe there's like a line there and I'm only going to put the butter from this line down you'll see why when I go to fold it up so I'm just kind of spreading big dollops of the butter in that space and you can go right to the edges and make sure you use all of the butter and notice that the butter itself is like it's smooth and creamy and softened but it's not like shiny or greasy looking so basically what I'm saying is it's sort of cool room temp it's not warm you'll just achieve a better texture if your butter is not like on its way to Melting so now I'm going to use this offset spatula and smooth the butter into an even layer all the way to the edges if you notice any areas where the butter is a little thicker run your spatula over it sort of scrape it off a little and then you can redistribute so now I'm going to go ahead and fold it in thirds like a letter this is often called A letter fold for that exact reason I'm going to take the naked upper third and fold it down along that line where the Butter Ends so it's going to cover the middle third so I'll show you what that looks like just going to gently lift it up and pull it down and the dough is pretty cooperative so what you can really do is like tug it and Pat it down so that you get this like St nice straight line so you feel like you really have folded it down into an even third to complete that letter fold I'm going to take the bottom third and Fold It Up across that middle section again and what it's going to do is create this series of layers where I have dough butter dough butter dough that make sense this is going to come up and I really do like to make sure all the edges align it's just going to make your life easier when you go to roll it out and so the basic process of lamination is now we have enclosed these layers of butter separated by layers of dough and we're going to roll it out and continue to fold it so we're going to multiply all those layers so this is what's called your book in like baking terms now anytime you do what's called a turn which is that process of rolling and folding we're going to rotate the book we have the seam on the top we're going to rotate at 90° so the seam is to my right and I do want to get a little bit of additional flower under the dough so I'm going to kind of move it out of the way for a sec so now I have that seam on the right so it would open up to my left if I were to unfold it and now I'm going to repeat that same rolling and folding process doing that letter fold in thirds one of the things you do want to try to do when you're rolling is to maintain somewhat right angles and like square corners so often I'll do like a little kind of motion with my rolling pin along those edges first and this is a relatively soft Cooperative dough like it's pretty relaxed from that rise so it's not so hard to get it to like do what you want it to do you can see it rolled out pretty easily I'm going to give it some more flow the cheese also creates like kind of its own layers which is really cool so you have sort of double layers you have cheese and butter you have to have a lot of confidence to do that flip like hold like the whole dough at once so if you're like not as confident with dough you might want to just like use the bench scraper to help you lift up one side dust a little flower underneath and then do the other side instead of moving the entire piece so I can also go this direction a little bit to widen it if you feel like the dough is springing back on you at any stage try rolling the other direction often you'll get like better sort of extension of the dough if you don't only roll it in One Direction you want to keep it somewhat straight so that when you go to do those folds you end up with like parallel sides so this looks good I'm kind of in that like 38 38 inch Zone and I'm going to repeat that same like trifold letter fold you can doesn't matter if you do it from the bottom it was important when we incorporated the butter that you do the like uncovered top area first so that you get the separation of layers but here it doesn't matter so you can do the bottom and again kind of like you can see that I'm pressing it and giving it a little encouragement to meet at all the sides I went a little far if you need to give yourself an extra roll so at this point we've worked the dough enough that it's not going to let me do another turn which is a like another rolling out and folding so we want to let it rest when you work dough like this the gluten kind of activates and will become like stretchy and elastic and so it's going to want to spring back so what I want to do is get this really really cold because remember I have yeast in this dough and at room temperature that yeast is going to want to like start you know bubbling up and producing gas and I want to slow that down for the time being until I can really finish my folds what I'm trying to say is I'm going to throw it in the freezer for like 10 minutes when we wrap it up first and then it's going to go into the fridge for like another 30 or so to really relax then we'll come back and do the final fold we're just doing two folds oh I don't have room for this it's enough outside [Music] absolutely so I had the dough out in the cold a little snow under it for about 10 minutes then I went into the fridge now I'm going to pull it out cuz it's been resting in the fridge for like maybe 30 or so and we're ready to do our final series of folds rolling and folding you say that again no all right okay okay so I'm going to grab it from the fridge it has a little bit of dirt on the plastic from the snow I put on top of it and it's a little wet the bag hold on it's maybe not my smartest idea okay so after that rest and letting it chill it's firmed up quite a bit so it feels really good I know that the dough is relaxed so I'll be able to roll it out and have it extend without springing back so exact same process some flour on the work surface going to unwrap it and remember you want to have the dough oriented the right way so meaning that seam on the right so it open up to your left so a little bit of flour on top you can just see from the way that it handles like it's much more solid and firm than it was on that first go around so you see how I'm applying pressure along the top and bottom edges to kind of help keep them Square lots of frequent lifting to prevent sticking so this is the final turn or series of folds and like for puff pastry for example or croissants you end up doing more you maybe do like three or possibly even four but I want like really big defined like visible layer so I I think that this amount of folding is perfect for these biscuits I I want to do more what ends up happening is as you do more is you get like it's a little counterintuitive because you actually get less definition because the layers get so thin sorry that's Argie playing with this toy so I want to actually widen this slab a little bit because now is really the only time during this process where the dimensions are something I'm paying attention to because I want the final folded piece of dough to be basically the right size for me to cut my biscuits and have them be you know about like inch and a half or 2 Ines square and this recipe makes 12 which I don't think I mentioned yet one tip that I tell people about rolling when you're rolling out a slab like dough of dough like this instead of pressing think about like pushing the dough away from your body and that tends to like just be more effective as a motion so now I'm ready to do my letter folds I'm just going to kind of give this Edge a little bit of attention so I'm just doing that same technique where I'm just making sure that the edges are aligned and that I have nice square corners just going to make my life easier and then the bottom third folds up again and same thing really kind of like just gently stretching the dough and patting it into place now we've already you know rolled out the dough and worked it so it's not going to want to roll out for you again really but if you feel like your packet is kind of thick like you don't really want it more than an inch and a quar thick you can try to go over it with your PIN at this stage to just flatten it out a little bit and make sure you go in both directions okay this looks great so now I'm going to wrap this back in plastic it's going to go back into the fridge and it just wants some time to hang out in the fridge let everything get like really firm and solid that rest in the fridge also improves flavor and texture so it's a great overnight so if you want to set this up the next morning we pull them out cut them and let them proof again okay and now just back into the fridge again minimum 6 hours you go overnight I wouldn't let it go more than like 16 hours [Music] I have a swap so I made the biscuits last night they've been chilling in the fridge it's been about 12 hours so now I'm going to take them out and I'm going to show you how to cut the biscuits then they go back on the same sheet tray and then they go for their second proof before we bake little Pro tip about making biscuits better to bake them on parchment paper than on a still pad because anything that's really buttery like cookies or biscuits tends to spread a lot on Sil hat so parchment is actually better for this so here's my little dough packet going to put onto my cutting board and just use that same sheet tray for baking get the parchment on there I wrapped it in trying to reuse my plastic bags so it got a little bit puffier overnight but not enough so we do need to let these proof again so whenever I'm making biscuits I just hate the idea of trim so you've probably seen this in other like biscuit or scone videos we've done where I like to cut them into squares rather than punching out circles because then I don't have to worry about doing anything with a trim so I have it in a in a rectangle so I'm going to actually cut it into 12 biscuits cutting into thirds on the shorter side and quarters on the longer side and I'm going to do a little bit of trimming just a little bit along the edges you can see when you cut to expose the interior you see like all those thin layers of butter um and that's what's going to cause that separation and make all the layers in the oven why didn't I cut them like on the earlier step before I put them in the fridge the reason is cuz you get much nicer cleaner Cuts after it's had a really long time to rest and chill and firm up so you just get these nice lines can you use the scraps for anything you can definitely bake these scraps and just like treat them as a little baker snack so now I'm going to do thirds on the shorter side side just giving myself a little guidelines and then quarters okay so now I have my 12 biscuits I'm going to put them on my line sheet tray you can see when I cut them on those cut sides that there is already some like air gas production from the yeast but these need to rise up a little bit more so because these are cold it's going to take a little while for the yeast to kind of like reactivate and awaken a little bit so I'm going to cover these hold on I'm going to let these sit until they are a little bit domed so what I'm looking for is like some additional separation of the layers and I'm going to see that the surface is like a little bit humped so I just want like a slight Dome on top when I was testing these in my kitchen it took like an hour and a half at like 70ish but if it's a little warmer in your kitchen it could be a little faster you just don't want it to be too warm because you don't want the butter to soften and like even start to melt um because then you're not going to get the separation so sort of a coolish room temperature spot and then we'll come back and bake them I think these are ready to go so you can see along the surfaces that there is just like this little domed shape at the top so they've like puffed up and the yeast has produced all these like little gas bubbles so these are ready to go I have my oven on 400 these bake in kind of a hot oven because I want there to be like a big blast of heat to to raise the biscuit so all those little air bubbles expand and then of course those layers of butter like puff and cause that separation so I have here just a little bit of extra butter that I melted and I'm going to use this to brush on on top of the biscuits you could brush the top with buttermilk that works too you could sprinkle like a little extra cheese on top it's really up to you but I just like using melted butter Okay jump in is that made for like this is made for yeah this is made no no this is made for like soy sauce like for sushi or like you know brushing the fish with whatever sauce so it's very soft bristles which is not always ideal but but I like it so these are going to go into my oven which is at 400 and they'll bake until they're like super puffy and golden brown on the top and the bottom it should take like 15 to 20 minutes they they bake pretty fast right on that center rack is where you want it to be I'll set my timer for 15 so at about the 10-minute Mark I did rotate the pan there's like pockets of cheese that are coming out the tops are super golden brown you see all the layers they're like so puffy now it's very normal that during cool in they're going to like lose some of that volume so they're going to sink just a little bit cuz a lot of that is also steam that's escaping they're pretty small so they cool somewhat quickly so I'm just going to let them rest here another really good sign I don't have a lot of butter pooling on the baking she sorry the againat sorry Ringo stop that you know what I do I just shove a pillow at him to like push him away so one good sign is um I don't have a lot of butter that pulled on the baking sheet so what that tells me is that the dough was like relaxed and so and well proofed so it didn't like contract and then like squeeze out all the butter so they look great you can see they've already settled down a little bit I'm just going to let them cool I'll eat them warm still so it's just going to take a few minutes you can see the bottoms like beautiful golden brown and like tons of layers they look so good should we get Jackson Galaxy Harrison I did start watching um My Cat From Hell where Jackson Galaxy goes to people's houses people who have terrible cats and he like helps them I think it would be a great collaboration but I know what he's going to tell us we need to create more vertical spaces for the cats so that they can go somewhere and not feel stressed out Harris and I were like looking around being like where can we put up like little like shelves where they can like go from like shelf to shelf like above like high up part of the reason the biscuits settle a little bit is because I have 7 ounces of cheese in there and the cheese sort of weighs them down a little bit so that's really normal but if you to make these without the cheese which you can definitely do and you can add any other kind of flavorings or just keep them plain when it comes to the butter they will maintain more of that volume so I'm going to actually get them off of the hot baking sheet and onto my uh [Music] rack so now they're still warm but they're not hot so a lot of steam is escaped and they're ready to eat very excited I'm going to cut into one just so you can see what like a cross-section looks like and you can kind of get a look at the layers even though they settle down a little bit they're still like very light for their size so that's how you know that they're not going to be like gummy on the inside so that they've been properly proofed so that's what it looks like a cross-section so what I love about these is that combination of flaky where I can literally like peel off layers but also fluffy like the layers themselves are fluffy because of the yeast so they you know there's like a crumb to it which I love they're so Tangy from the buttermilk and the cheese that like sharp cheddar and there's something so Savory about them and you're like what is that and it's that little bit of onion powder and that raw garlic in the butter itself they're insanely good I think that these are like great as a breakfast biscuit you could like put like a little sausage patty in the middle which is really good but they also because of that kind of fluffy texture they also make like an insanely good dinner roll so something you could really have at any point I used of course the Cary gold Reserve cheddar which is aged for 2 years so it's like really sharp and creamy and has like very concentrated flavor but you could use any like hard grating cheese that you like I recommend a sharp cheddar these are so delicious and it also kind of introduces you to that technique of lamination it's like a little more lowkey because you're just kind of spreading the butter on there and folding it and rolling and like any kind of tear or temperature isn't as important so really fun kind of a gateway to like easted do's and lamination but I think just like not that hard I want to thank our friends at Cary gold for sponsoring the episode I always use Cary gold butter in all of my baking I use the butter here and the biscuits plus their cheddar check out their whole range of cheeses and butters at the website below so thank you so much for watching and don't forget to like And subscribe [Music]

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 266,243

Keywords: Claire Saffitz, Claire Saffitz Makes, Claire Saffitz Bon Appetit, Bon Appetit, Gourmet Makes, Cheddar, Cheddar Biscuits, Cheddar Butter Biscuits, Homemade Biscuits, Biscuits From Scratch, Scratch Biscuits, Easy Biscuits, Biscuit Recipe, Biscuits, Biscuits Recipe, Puff Pastry, Biscuits At Home, Homemade Biscuit Recipe, Cheese, Red Lobster, Dessert Person, Baking, Baking Tips, Baking Techniques, How To Make Biscuits, How To Make Biscuit, How To Bake, Bread, Savory, Bread Recipe

Id: 6taJ4OWP-ZE

Length: 33min 8sec (1988 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024