Chloe-Rose Crabtree’s Infinitely Customisable Biscuits
More versatile than scones, this biscuit recipe encourages experimentation to find your ideal version. Text and photography by Chloe-Rose Crabtree.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Chloe-Rose Crabtree. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Infinitely customisable American-style biscuits
More versatile than scones, this biscuit recipe encourages experimentation to find your ideal version. Text and photography by Chloe-Rose Crabtree.
I like to say that biscuits – in the American sense – are like scones but better, partly because it’s an annoying thing to say, but also because I believe it. The two are prepared very similarly: fat is cut into flour and then gently mixed with dairy to create a dough, which is then cut and nestled in a pan (the resulting ‘hug’ between pieces grants a higher rise), baked in a hot oven, and enjoyed warm with an array of toppings.
The real difference seems to be the context in which they are enjoyed. Like scones, biscuits can be sweet or savoury, but whereas a scone is most associated with teatime, a biscuit can accompany any meal of the day. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, the biscuit’s superiority lies in this versatility. Biscuits can be served with gravy, used to make breakfast sandwiches, or placed on top of savoury pies or sweet cobblers, as well as eaten with butter and jam.
While researching this recipe, I dove into my cookbook collection and found recipes for biscuits dating from 1914 to 1975, made with a wide array of different flours and fillings. I chose to stick to the classic buttermilk (or sour milk) variations. All told, I tried at least eight different recipes, with varying success. In the end, six recipes, each with their own merits, made the grade.
As I went through each batch, I was struck by how such a simple recipe could create such varying results. This simplicity means that there is little room to hide – the quality of the end product all comes down to technique and confidence. When I teach people how to make pastry, I tell them to pay attention to how their hands feel at certain mixing stages. Biscuits require the same kind of attention. You need to get your hands dirty to know how to feather the fat into the flour and how to deftly shuffle the liquid through the dry mix to moisten your dough just enough, before gently bringing the mass together. You might fuck things up a few times before you get it right (thankfully the ingredients for biscuits are pretty cheap), but in the process you will also teach yourself to really feel the dough, which means that in future you’ll know exactly how to achieve the desired result.
After making ten batches of biscuits over the course of two days, I noticed a couple of mistakes I was making along the way. The first was that I trusted my home oven, despite it being unevenly mounted and notoriously unreliable. As a result, the first biscuits I tested weren’t baked hot enough and, although delicious when warm, they became very dense once they cooled. The second mistake was that I trusted a ‘biscuit hack’ I saw online that led me to overmix the dough, even though I could feel it getting tough in my hands. Even us professionals are not immune to making errors – the important thing is to know how to recover from them.
I am from Los Angeles, not the American South, where biscuits reign supreme, so I am not going to claim that these biscuits are the ‘best ever’, or that this is the biscuit recipe to end all biscuit recipes. Besides, biscuit preference is a very personal thing. Instead, this recipe gives you a framework to build off to find your biscuit ideal, with very clear instructions on how to mix the dough. In the notes that follow the recipe, I have provided a guide to using different types of flour, fat, leavening agent, and dairy (and non-dairy). My own recipe changes depending on what I have on hand at home. If you too have an unreliable home oven, I’ve also provided some tips on how to avoid ending up with dense rocks, along with some other ways to use biscuit dough.
Recipe below (including a vegan version).