Quick Buttermilk Biscuits

I'm all for fast food made at home. As long as you are using real ingredients, why not make things easy on yourself? Now, I'm not talking Jiffy mix here. I've never much understood the point of box mixes. Do they really save that much time? Is it worth all the extra chemicals and packaging for the 3 minutes you save measuring flour, salt, and baking soda? I'm not judging here, I just honestly don't understand the point of box mixes. I do have a confession to make though, I have bought biscuits in a tube. I heard the gasp from here! You know, the ones in the refrigerator section? Yup. Not recently, of course! Gosh, these days it never fails, as soon as I go to buy anything from the freezer section I run into someone I know. Yes, it's me with the food blog, buying frozen pizza for dinner. David keeps threatening to write an exposé on what food bloggers really eat! 

Getting back to the biscuits, I've always kind of struggled to make good biscuits. I'm pretty sure it was because I was born and raised in Michigan (that's my excuse for a lot of things). So, I didn't have a southern grandmother to teach me how to make biscuits. The tube of biscuits that you slam on the counter, and that popping noise is kind of fun right? No? Ok, a food blogger must learn how to make a decent biscuit. I'm pretty sure it is in my blogger contract. I had recently learned to make a decent pie crust in the food processor, maybe biscuits would work too. It turned out to be a great idea. These biscuits baked up light and fluffy. Seriously, it took me about 20 minutes to make them including the baking time. While I am sure that there are a lot of southern grandmothers out there who make biscuits better, I can also guarantee that nobody is going to turn down one of these fresh out of the oven, and they are 100 times better than the ones in the tube.

[The tea towel with the wood stoves on it was made by Homesteading Roasters in Homer, Alaska]

Quick Buttermilk Biscuits
adapted from Food.com

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting the board
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt or 1 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, very cold
1 cup buttermilk


Preheat your oven to 450°F.
Combine the dry ingredients in the bowl of a food processor.
Cut the butter into chunks, add to food processor pulse a few times until it resembles course meal. Add the buttermilk and process until just combined. Keep in mind that you want to process and handle this dough as little as possible to turn out light biscuits.
Turn the dough out onto a floured board. Gently, very gently pat the dough with your hands until it's about 1 inch thick. Use a biscuit cutter to cut the dough into circles (or squares if you have a square biscuit cutter). You can gently knead the scraps together and make a few more, but don't do this more than once. Place the biscuits on a cookie sheet touching each other.
Bake for about 10-12 minutes until the biscuits are light golden brown on top. Serve warm with butter and jam, or sausage gravy poured over the top [coming soon].