Easy Southern Buttermilk Biscuits Recipe

Say “good-bye” to tough biscuits that taste like hockey pucks. These southern-style buttermilk biscuits are made from scratch with only three simple ingredients and the end results are light biscuits ready for strawberry jam, ham, or whatever biscuit toppings and fillings you like.

If you have half an hour, you can make a batch of these classic 3-ingredient biscuits from scratch.

How To Make These Homestyle Biscuits

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

Directions

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.  You can line a baking sheet with parchment paper or simply 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 ½-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 am able to get about 9 biscuits out of a batch of dough.

Place the cut biscuits on a prepared baking sheet or baking stone. Be sure to leave a couple of inches of space between the biscuits. You don’t want them to bake together.

All that is left is to 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.

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

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

If you’re from the South, these are sure to remind you of your grandma’s buttermilk biscuits. All you need now is some red-eye or cocoa (chocolate) gravy to top them with. Of course, they are always great with sausage gravy.

Recipe Notes

If you use unsalted butter, add ¼ 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 ¼ 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 will have to double those ingredients: ½ teaspoon salt, 3 tablespoons baking powder, plus enough flour to total 2 cups along with an extra ¼ cup of flour.

Whisk the dry ingredients well to get the ingredients mixed thoroughly. You can use organic flour and make a nearly-organic option. (You will not find organic self-rising flour in a store or online.)

Buttermilk Substitution

Don’t have any buttermilk?  You can make a simple sour milk substitute by placing a tablespoon vinegar into a measuring cup and adding 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

I like to take shortcuts when I can and so for these homemade buttermilk biscuits, I used to use my food processor to incorporate butter into the flour mixture. It was so much easier than a fork, knife, or a pastry blender . All one has to do is pulse butter in flour a few times until the pieces are about pea-size.

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.

For an elegant treat, serve biscuits with Chocolate Cherry Jam. While these easy biscuits are great any day, they also make a great addition to weekend brunches with all of the fixin’s like cheesy hash browns, scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, bacon, and sausage.    

Don’t Forget To Come Back And Let Me Know How Your Buttermilk Biscuits Turned Out!