Sourdough Buttermilk Biscuits (the best on planet Earth!)

howy folks I'm Ben star the ultimate food geek welcome back to my kitchen today we are making sourdough Buttermilk Biscuits now y'all I have been making biscuits almost since I was capable of standing up since I've been making buttermilk biscuits for most of my life I am definitely a biscuit snob I rarely find an acceptable biscuit at a restaurant and that's because they don't feed you the biscuit right out of the oven biscuits must be eatting right out of the oven but also when I have friends that say oh I'm going to make biscuits and then they take out a weird tube from the refrigerator or they open this weird box of bisqui there is no way on Earth to get my blood pressure up like seeing that folks traditional Buttermilk Biscuits are so easy to make it literally takes the same amount of time to make them from scratch as it does to pop open that awful container or like open a box of biscuit but because I have been making buttermilk biscuits for most of my life I never Incorporated sourdough even though I've been baking with sourdough for two decades but I was recently challenged by one of my friends to incorporate sourdough into a buttermilk biscuit and see if I can make a biscuit that is better than the buttermilk biscuits that I am famous for and guess what they turned out so incredible like I was sitting there eating it not even believing how incredible it was the addition of sourdough starter to biscuits not only gives it this wonderful crusty texture it's the flavor is so complex and Rich it's like light years above the best buttermilk biscuit that I have ever had in my entire life so today I'm going to teach you how to make that sourdough buttermilk biscuit now clearly sourdough is not a new addition to Buttermilk Biscuits so many misled people out there are discarding and feeding their starter every single day and they've got to figure out some way to cram that discard into other recipes that biscuits were one of the first things people thought about well for those of you who follow my channel you know that we don't ever discard starter we only feed our starter when we need to make more so we don't find ourselves needing to put sourdough starter into every single thing that we bake if you're a Sourdough Baker and this sounds like heaven to you spend some time on my Channel with my other videos and you'll be shocked you don't need to feed your starter but in this case we are incorporating the souro starter as a flavoring agent rather than a leavening agent so this is technically a discard recipe even though there's no such thing is discard in my sourdough world now this method does take a couple of extra steps that you don't have to do with regular Buttermilk Biscuits which you can make in a single bowl today we're going to dirty up two bowls and we're going to dirty up a whisk so there's a slightly higher dishwashing burden to these but once you taste this you will not mind washing that extra bone and whisk at all now for um metric folks I am speaking in ounces today but the metric equivalents are going to be right there on the screen and they'll also be in the written recipe which is located in the video description below this video you can also go to Ultimate foodgeek ccom my website and get a printable version for free your very first step is to preheat your oven to 425° and you want to put the rack of the oven one or two racks below the center of the oven to make sure you get really good crust crusty bottoms on your biscuits I'm actually using my teeny tiny top oven and it's only got one rack but it preheats super fast okay let's get started so we're going to measure our ingredients today get a scale if you don't have one there's no way to bake with consistency without a scale especially if you're a beginner my favorite scale is linked in the video description below we want to start with 4 ounz of sourdough starter at 100% hydration 100% hydration means that when you feed your starter you feed it equal weights not measures or volumes equal weights of flour and water so a sample feeding for you might be 8 oz of flour and 8 O of water equal weights as long as you feed your starter that way you're good on this recipe if your starter is over hydrated your biscuits are not going to turn out as crusty and delicious and I do have a video called troubleshooting simple sourdough that will teach you how to fix your starter if it is overhydrated all right to our starter we are going to add 4 ounces of Buttermilk and that means buttermilk real buttermilk those of you who say oh I just make buttermilk by adding a little bit of vinegar to my milk no you are not not making buttermilk you are making vinegary milk buttermilk is a naturally fermented product that acidifies through the fermentation process with lactobacillus bacteria it has a delicious taste all by itself would you want to drink that milk that you just poured vinegar in I don't think so buttermilk is a crucial ingredient folks I keep it in my kitchen all the time it should always be in your refrigerator and if you're one of those folks that say oh it expires before I use it buttermilk lasts weeks beyond the expiration date get a small container and then when you run out all you got to do is fill that container with regular milk shake it up put it on your countertop for 2 days and it turns itself into buttermilk so buttermilk is sort of like sourdough starter you can perpetuate it over and over and over again without having to buy more it's super cool all right 4 oz of Buttermilk now we need to get these Incorporated with each other I like to use one of these little spiral whisks or gravy whisks because it seems to work just a little bit better than a regular whisk you can use a fork whatever just make sure you get that sourdough starter incorporated into the buttermilk so that it's a fairly homogeneous mix all right that takes a little while but be patient it will come together try to get the majority of that out of your whisk or whatever you're mixing with CU you don't want to under hydrate your recipe now it's time for our dry ingredients we are looking for 7 oz of allpurpose flour and folks use allpurpose flour don't use bread flour for this recipe it does not work it makes your biscuits tough 1 tblspoon of baking powder make sure it's baking powder not baking soda they are not interchangeable and make sure if you don't use this very often that you check your expiration date on the bottom of the pan because if you try to use expired baking powder you're not going to get a proper rise to your biscuits and finally a teaspoon or about 3/10 of an ounce of salt I don't actually measure this one it's not that important you just need to make sure you're getting about a teaspoon in there now I stir this around with my fingers but you can use a fork if you want now it's time to incorporate our butter and you want the butter to be very very cold so I tend to put my stick of butter in the freezer for 5 or 10 minutes just before I make this recipe just to make sure it's nice and cold now we are using unsalted butter today because we always bake with unsalted butter salted butter only has one purpose and that's to smear on a biscuit or something else right before it goes into your mouth we always bake with unsalted butter because we do not know how much salt is in any given measure of butter so that we can make sure our recipe has the correct total amount of salt so if you're somebody that only buys salted butter stop doing that get unsalted butter and use it for this recipe so I'm going to cut some little Pats of butter off of this entire stick that will help speed up the process by which the butter gets incorporated into this dough and now it's time to cut in the butter this is a classic pastry making technique and there are multiple ways to do this but for me my favorite way is to use a pastry blender now I have gone through dozens of pastry blenders across my life and I have hated almost all of them they eventually Bend or warp they're not sturdy even ones that I've spent quite a bit of money on couple of years ago I discovered this it's called the perfect pie blender and you can get it on Amazon I'll put the link below and it changed my life it is super sturdy these tines have never warped they're incredibly strong they're actually diamond shaped so they act like little knives as you push down through I've always been frustrated with the pastry blenders that have the little wires that are around because that doesn't cut butter very easily if you don't have a pastry blender and don't want to get this one there are other ways to do it you can do it with your fingers actually smearing the butter and the flour together but that's hard on your hands alternatively you can take a couple of knives like this get in there and cut across the butter just like that over and over and over again but the pastry blender is definitely the easiest way to go now there is another way which is what I use for pie crust and that is to grate the butter on a box grater but I find with biscuits that does not give me the texture that I'm looking for a biscuit is a rustic product and so I like having larger and smaller chunks of butter and that doesn't happen when you grate the butter however if you've got a grater and don't have a pastry blender that's definitely the easiest way to go you just won't have that perfect texture to your biscuits so we are going to push down and turn on this butter it does require a little bit of arm power to do but because we've got so many tin here slicing through that butter it incorporates it very quickly every now and then scrape out that butter and get it back into the dish now it doesn't take more than about 30 seconds of this to get that butter to the right consistency all right that looks good so you can see here we've got some bits of butter that look sort of like tiny little Pebbles and then some that look more like little bitty crumbs that's exactly the texture that you're going for and now it's time to incorporate our mix of Buttermilk and sourd starter I like to make a little bit of a well in the center of the bowl rake all of that out make sure you clean that bowl good so we're getting the full amount into the mix and then I switch to a fork now at this point it becomes very easy to overwork this dough this is a quick bread we do not want to activate or develop the gluten because that will make the bread tough we are relying on the chemical leavening agents and the baking powder to produce a ton of carbon dioxide as soon as we put these biscuits into the oven which is what causes them to rise so the less we work the dough the better so what we're going to do is take this fork and just drag the dry ingredients through the wet ingredients as we rotate the bowl this is not a stirring process just a dragging process we have to exert a little bit more pressure as the dough starts to thicken up and you're not going to be able to incorporate every last bit of those dry ingredients using the dragging technique so once it looks like you're not getting any more blending we're going to get into this bowl with our hands put a little bit of flour on your hand and we're going to get in here and just kind of press this dough together gently not too firm now we are going to begin a series of folds that are going to create the layers of our biscuit so we're going to get underneath the dough here and flip it it over about halfway down the center and we're going to take any of that extra flour that we get from the bottom of the bowl and sprinkle it on top then we're going to go to the other side of the dough and fold it back over on top as well and we see all this extra flour too that we're going to bring here on top now we're going to press down I like to use the backs of my fingers to press because they are cooler than the warmer part of the inside of your hand and we don't want any of this butter to melt before we get it into the oven now this recipe is fairly dry if you've made a lot of biscuits before it's probably drier than you're accustomed to don't worry that is what creates this incredibly delicious crusty outside on the biscuit and then a moist fluffy interior all right so we've got one of those layering steps finished we're going to do the exact same thing again so we're going to get down here and fold that over into the center taking any extra flour that we've got there and sprinkling out into the middle and then we're going to do the same to the other side bringing it into the center and we still got quite a bit of flour here that's totally fine now we're going to gently press that down and now it's time to remove this to our work surface so we're going to give a fairly generous sprinkling of flour transferring our biscuit dough out and then all of that stuff that's left we're just going to sprinkle right here onto the surface of the dough and even it out all right now we're going to Pat this out just a little bit more and do another turn with our first turn we folded one layer over the top and another one over that created three layers when we did it the second time that flat dough had three layers so when we turned the three layers over on top we had six layers and then the other flip made nine layers so this dough currently has nine layers in it we are going to now change that from 9 to 18 layers and 27 layers so we've got 27 layers to our biscuits now I like to stop there now if you want to go all the way up to 81 layers by repeating this turn you can but your biscuits are going to become fractionally tougher when you do that and the technique that you use to cut these biscuits out you might actually be reincorporating some of the dough which is going to make it even exponentially tougher so I like to stop at 27 layers for me 27 layers is perfectly fine and you'll see that our dough is nice and cohesive at this point so now we want to press it out into our cutting shape definitely do not use a rolling pin here the rolling pin is too tough you want the thickness of your dough to be about 1 in but the shape in which you press it out sort of depends on how you're going to cut it whether you're going to make round biscuits or Square biscuits now I am a biscuit traditionalist and to me a square biscuit is just against all of the laws of nature it drives me crazy crazy but the square biscuit is the smartest way to go because you can simply make a line down the center and cut these into perfect square biscuits using a bench scraper or a knife and then you don't have to overwork the dough to get more rounds out so you can see you got perfect little biscuits just like this that have not had overworked dough but because that just feels extremely unnatural to me I am going to go ahead with the biscuit cutter now the number of biscuits that this recipe yields will depend entirely on the size of your cutter all right once you have the biscuits out you've got some scraps here and it's best to as gently as possible work those back together into a piece where you can cut more biscuits out I have found that my reassembled biscuits that I cut are considerably tougher once they're baked so you want to minimize the number of times that you bring dough scraps back together to cut out more biscuits all right I'm going to get these onto a sheet pan I have lined my baking sheet with one of these pre-cut parchment sheets when I discovered this y'all I changed my life because I absolutely hate trying to tear parchment in a straight line it's also cheaper than the parchment rolls that you get in the supermarket because you're ordering it in bulk and you only have to order it like once a year depending on how heavily you use it really one of my favorite time saers in the kitchen all right these are going to go into a 425° oven for 14 minutes once they're beautifully Brown on the top and the bottom they can come out of the oven that's going to take about 14 minutes but you might need to leave yours in just a little bit longer or a little bit shorter depending on your oven unlike fresh sourdough bread biscuits need to be eaten the instant they come out of the oven piping hot that is when they are at their best you can see we've got nice beautiful layers here to our biscuits I love seeing that steam come out of them if you like taller biscuits you can form more layers and cut the biscuits out thicker but for me I don't like to bite through a lot of soft biscuit before I get to that payload which is the nice Crunch at the bottom and the top and as I mentioned earlier the only purpose for salted butter is to sit at room temperature on your countertop ready to smear onto something you're about to put in your mouth let's give them a taste y they are so crusty on the outside and tender moist flavorful on the inside this blows a regular old buttermilk biscuit way out of the water well I got a crowd of people right over there ready to eat these babies so I got to wrap it up folks if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing to my channel it helps me out a lot give me a like feel free to comment in the comments below especially if you're having trouble with the recipe I try to get around to every single comment for folks that need help hit me up on my website ultimate food geek.com I'm Ben star the ultimate foodgeek thanks for watching watching

Channel: Ben Starr

Views: 14,861

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Id: R05l-gDxnuM

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024