I figured out the grating butter trick the way I figure out almost every hack I have: by being lazy efficient. I keep my butter in the freezer b/c I can’t stand the “refrigerator burn” it gets when it picks up the random smells of the other things in the ‘frig with it. But that means my butter is always frozen when it comes time to make a recipe, and because I never plan ahead, that leaves me in a jam if I need cold, but not frozen, butter. If you need softened butter, you can do it in the microwave. But there’s no cheater way to make a stick of cold butter from a stick of frozen butter. And when I want biscuits for breakfast, like I did today, I want them *now*. The whole point of biscuits is you can have them in like 15 minutes and is defeated by defrosting time.
Which is why I started grating my frozen butter on the large holes of a hand grater. It worked like a charm, and the shape of the shreds was *perfect* for flaky biscuits. I was awfully smug about this trick until I discovered that literally every pastry chef on the planet (and probably most of you) already figured it out. That’s what I get for patting myself on the back for discovering a *shortcut* for a 15-minute recipe. But I’ll point out this trick works awesomely for pie crusts as well, which are marginally more work. And some people’s biscuit recipes take more than 15 minutes (and are probably much better than mine, but again, the whole point of biscuits….)
Here’s my recipe, which I think came from my 4H cookbook when I was a kid. I haven’t made any changes to the ratios, but I do use whatever ingredients I have to hand–flour, liquid, fat all change depending on what I’ve got. Today when I made them, I didn’t have baking powder and had to sub baking soda (at a 1/3 ratio, swapping in yoghurt for the milk to supply the acid needed to react with the soda). Worked like a charm in terms of rising, though since I can’t taste anything right now, I couldn’t tell you whether the soda flavor was too strong or not! My point is just that biscuits are pretty forgiving and flexible–and, best of all, really quick!
Biscuits
Makes 8 large or 10 smaller biscuits
- 2 C flour
- 1 T baking powder
- 1 T sugar
- 1 t salt
- 1/4 C (4 T) frozen butter
- 3/4 C milk, buttermilk, or runny yoghurt
Preheat oven to 425°F. Mix dry ingredients together in large bowl. Grate frozen butter into bowl and toss shreds to coat well with flour. Stir in milk to make a shaggy dough. Scrape out on counter and knead 5-6 times just until dough smoothes out. Pat to 1/2 in. thick and cut out biscuits with cutter, squishing together scraps into ugly but delicious extra biscuits. Bake 10-12 minutes.
The Rookery 