Plaza Biscuit Recipe – Food Friday

I’m not entirely sure you are allowed to refer to yourself as a good southern cook if you can’t whip up some delicious biscuits to accompany your dishes. I don’t make the rules, I just make sure I can crush this Plaza biscuit recipe when I need to. Similar to how the baguette is sometimes seen as the mark of a good French baker, the biscuit is the benchmark food in the Southern culinary world. The ingredients are simple but it takes a good “biscuit hand” to pull them off.

Plaza Biscuit Recipe

I didn’t mention all of that to scare you off, I promise. Just impressing on you how much you need a good, easy biscuit recipe to knock out any day of the week. The best part about southern biscuits, beside how good they taste with anything, is how quickly you can make them. You could feasibly go from pulling the ingredients out of the cupboard to cramming them in your mouth in 30-40 minutes. Thus is the magic of the ‘quick bread’ category of baking: no kneading, no proving, no waiting.

Tools for the job

Do you need expensive, specialized tools to make easy biscuits in your home? Definitely not. For now, I’ll assume you have a baking sheet and a bowl large enough to mix the ingredients. Outside of those, you really just need three tools that are probably already in your kitchen. If not, I’ll link to the ones I personally use in case you are interested.

First, you need a good spatula. I didn’t say expensive though, just well made. You need something to really stir around the ingredients well enough quickly without becoming a dough club. Wooden spoons are good but can tend to clump up on sticky dough like biscuits and become a huge mess. I personally like these Rubbermaid Commercial spatulas because they are cheap and heads won’t break off (that happens, trust me).

Second, you need board scraper (again, nothing fancy). My board scraper is one of the most frequently used tools in the kitchen. I use it to scrape up diced veggies easily, to scrape crumbs off the counter when cleaning, and even chopping things quickly. We need it here to wrangle the shaggy dough on the counter after it comes out of the bowl. You could use your hands but they’d get covered in sticky dough, over mix it, and melt the butter in the dough. None of those things are good. Just get a $10 board scraper like I have.

Third, you need a kitchen scale. Trust me, nothing will have the impact on your baking as much as this tool will. Most recipes don’t mention this but a lot of baking ingredients NEED to be weighed and not doled out in a measuring cup. Cook’s Illustrated mentions that ingredients like flour vary significantly in weight for 1 cup depending on how you scoop it. Make sure you have the right amount of dry ingredients by weighing them.

My recommendations if you need them

Plaza Biscuit Recipe

Easy Southern Biscuit

An easy southern style biscuit you could bake up in 30 minutes for breakfast or as a side dish.

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Prep Time 10 mins

Cook Time 20 mins

Total Time 30 mins

Course Side Dish

Cuisine American

Servings 12 biscuits

Calories 50 kcal

Ingredients

  

FOR STEP 2

• 30 gram unsalted butter diced and chilled
• 60 gram Shortening

FOR STEP 3

• 340 gram all-purpose flour
• 4 tsp Baking Powder
• ¾ tsp Kosher Salt
• ¼ tsp Baking Soda

FOR STEP 5

• 1 Cup buttermilk

Instructions

 

• Set oven to 450 F
• Dice up butter and add in shortening. Chill in freezer while you measure the dry ingredients to keep the butter cold
• Add the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda to a large mixing bowl and stir to combine
• Add butter shortening mix to the dry ingredients and cut the fat into the flour with your fingers. Just reach in, pick up some of the diced butter pieces, and smash them in your fingertips into the flour. Keep doing this until as much of the flour is incorporated into the butter as you can. Try not to let the butter melt
• Add buttermilk and stir with spatula to combine all of the flour mixture. It won't be smooth, you just need to get as much of the flour into the dough ball as you can
• Tip the dough out onto a floured counter
• With a board scraper, press it together into a rough rectangle. Using the scraper, reach under half and fold it onto itself like a playdough book. Keep pressing it down and folding it about 8 times until the dough has a consistent texture.
• Use a 2" biscuit cutter or any other round thing really to cut out the biscuits
• Place on a baking sheet in the 450 F oven for 10 minutes, rotate pan and bake for another 10 minutes or until they are golden brown on the tops.

Notes

Try to not over mix the dough in the bowl or the biscuits will be tough and chewy. You want to mix or handle the dough as little as possible.

Try not to twist the cutter at the bottom of the biscuit to release them. It is a strong impulse but it kind of seals the bottom layers and prevents them from rising.

Keyword biscuit, bread

Find all my recipes on the dedicated recipe page

Link to Plaza And Main St Recipes