Easy Southern Buttermilk Biscuits Recipe

Ingredients

The first thing you need to do is to gather your ingredients. The French call this mise en place. You need the following three items:

• 2 ½ cups of self-rising flour
• 6 Tablespoons of cold butter
• 1 cup of buttermilk

How To Make These Homestyle Biscuits

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. You can line a baking sheet with parchment paper or use an ungreased baking sheet. To make buttermilk biscuits, place flour in a large mixing bowl and add butter that has been cut into cubes. Using a pastry cutter or forks, “cut” the butter cubes into pea-size pieces or coarse crumbs. It helps to coat the butter in a little flour when doing this.

Add buttermilk to the flour and pieces of butter and mix well with a spoon. The mixture will be “sticky.”  Sprinkle your work surface with flour and then place your dough on top. Mold the flour mixture into a cohesive ball and then pat it into a circle or rectangle so that it’s about an inch thick. There’s no need to pull out your rolling pin to roll the dough like it’s a pie crust.

Next, use a round biscuit cutter to cut out the biscuits from the dough. The number of biscuits you get will vary depending on the size of the biscuit cutter – or cup- that you use. If you use a 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter, you might get 8-10 biscuits. If you use a 3-inch biscuit cutter, you will get fewer biscuits.

I like to use a drinking glass. You can dip the open end in a little flour to help prevent sticking. Then when you are finished, rinse it off, and then you can put it in the dishwasher to clean.

I get about 9 biscuits out of a batch of dough.

Baking Time

Bake them in the preheated oven for 11-12 minutes. Carefully remove them when they have a nice, golden top. Brush biscuits with butter while they are still warm. Store leftover biscuits at room temperature.

If you are a biscuit lover and can’t get enough biscuits, check out my other biscuit recipes:

• Biscuits and Gravy
• Butter Swim Biscuits 
• Red Lobster Biscuit Copycat
• Biscuits without Buttermilk

Can buttermilk biscuits be frozen?

Absolutely! You can freeze uncooked biscuit dough. Simply follow the directions through step number 3. However, instead of baking them, place them in the freezer for 3-4 hours. Once they are frozen solid, remove them from the baking sheet and place them in a freezer ziptop bag.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Remove the desired number of frozen biscuits and place them on a baking sheet. Bake for 22-24 minutes or until golden.

Recipe Notes

If you using unsalted butter, add 1/4 teaspoon of salt to the self-rising flour.

Self-Rising Flour Substitution

If you don’t have self-rising flour on hand, don’t worry. Here is a handy recipe adapted from King Arthur Flour: Place 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 ½ tablespoons baking powder, and enough flour all-purpose flour to fill up a one-cup measuring cup.

For this recipe, you double those ingredients: 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 tablespoons baking powder, plus enough flour to total 2 cups along with an extra 1/4 cup of flour.

Buttermilk Substitution

Don’t have any buttermilk? You can make a simple sour milk substitute by placing a tablespoon of vinegar into a measuring cup and adding whole milk so that the combination reaches the 1-cup mark. Stir and let it sit for 10 minutes so that the milk will “sour.”

Alternatively, you can use fresh lemon juice to make sour milk. Just follow the above directions but use 1 tablespoon lemon juice instead of vinegar.

Shortcuts and Tips

I like to take shortcuts when I can and for these homemade buttermilk biscuits, I use my food processor to incorporate butter into the flour mixture. It is much easier than a fork, knife, or pastry blender. Simply pulse butter in flour a few times until the pieces are the size of peas.

Another option for getting small pieces of butter is to use a cheese grater. You want the butter to be really cold. Freeze a stick of butter for 10-15 minutes for the best results.

However, I discovered that an even easier way to make them is to use melted butter. Yep. That’s right. Melted butter.

You see, when you pour COLD buttermilk over melted butter, it often causes the butter to re-harden. Just stir the buttermilk, melted butter, and flour together while you are pouring in the buttermilk. A shaggy dough forms initially, but stir a little more, and then you should be able to knead it a little and then roll it out.