Culinary quarantine projects have abounded this year. We’ve seen friends and family tackle sourdough bread, jar and pickle everything in sight, refine their grilling techniques.
Our wonderful local restaurants have obliged, too, by shifting to carryout cocktails, perfecting their takeout game, and offering family meal kits. Early on during the shutdowns, Lauren Culley, one of the owners of Fox in the Snow Cafe, generously offered her recipes for first her buttermilk biscuits and then her towering chocolate chip cookies. We gladly took up the biscuit challenge multiple times. They’re not as beautiful as Lauren’s, but they’re fun to make and certainly delicious.
Lauren collaborated with Aftermarq to produce a pair of fun and informative videos about the recipes. You can see both videos and recipes on their site here. If you’re making the biscuits, I’d definitely recommend watching the video first, as she shares some extra tips there. See it below:
The great thing about the recipe is that you’ll always have the ingredients on hand: flour, eggs, butter, sugar, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cream. If you don’t have buttermilk on hand, you can easily make your own: just mix one tablespoon of lemon juice into one cup of milk, stir, and let sit.
Lauren’s recipe has you barely pulsing the butter into the dry ingredients: she aims to get nickel-sized chunks of butter in the dough. Then it’s a process and folding and refolding and folding again in order to build those layers.
The biscuits feel like heavy hockey pucks when they’re ready. They get coated in a heavy cream-egg yolk mixture, and at this point they can either go straight in the oven or in the freezer. I made a few batches for a trip, freezing them on parchment paper-lined trays, then packing them into freezer bags. You can then pop them in the oven right from the freezer.
Ideally, the biscuits will come out as these golden brown, flaky towers like Lauren’s. But she’s the expert, not me. Despite my best efforts, mine have tended to slip, but again – they still taste great.
My best results have come from freezing the biscuits first, and from making sure – as Lauren suggests – than you cut straight down without twisting the cutter.
Regardless of how tall and proud or squat and funny the biscuits turn out, they’re always a buttery, flaky delight to eat.
The only modification we made is to reduce the amount of salt (we’ve done one tablespoon as opposed to Lauren’s one tablespoon + one teaspoon); the first batch tasted just a touch too salty to us. (EDIT: I may have just realized that that one teaspoon is for topping the biscuits when they’re done, and not for the dough itself. Hang with me, folks, I’ll get there eventually.)
Perhaps the best part is drizzling the biscuits with rich honey butter glaze when they’re hot out of the oven.
We’ve followed Lauren’s lead and filled them with homemade strawberry jam.
And then we’ve left off the honey drizzle and served them with homemade sausage gravy – also amazing.
Thanks to Lauren for sharing her recipe and expertise! You can find it, along with an instructional video, here.
