Don't they look delicious?
I love biscuits. There’s nothing quite like a biscuit fresh from the oven, sliced while still warm and slathered in butter. Holy moly….drool. And biscuits are so versatile! You can use them for any meal, and they make a great platform for breakfast jams or eggs and cheese, lunch tomatoes and lettuce, or dinner chicken and gravy. The uncooked dough can also be repurposed as dumplings for soup or a topping for cobbler. I’ve also used this recipe as a base for pizza.
This recipe uses wild collected sourdough starter. Review our post on collecting your own wild yeast here: Collecting and Maintaining Wild Yeast Sourdough Starter.
RECIPE
(This makes 6 biscuits, double the recipe for more):
- 1/2 cup sourdough starter, removed from refrigerator the night before, fed, and left to sit overnight
- 1/4 cup sour raw milk, buttermilk, or plain yogurt
- 1 cup (or more) flour (I used wheat but you can use white)
- 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons bacon fat, lard, or butter (cold)
- 1 tablespoon vodka (Vodka provides a wonderful tenderness and some forgiveness if you add too much flour. The alcohol cooks off in the oven.)
Preheat your oven to 400F.
Combine the flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder in a bowl and stir with a fork to combine. (You can sift it, but who really does that anymore?)
Use a fork to cut in the fat/lard/butter until the fat is about pea-sized.
Add the sourdough starter, the milk or yogurt, and the vodka and combine thoroughly.
Add flour until the dough is easy to handle, but don’t make the dough dry. You may need to use the full cup of flour, or you may need to add more. Add enough flour to keep your biscuit dough on the sticky side but still manageable.
Place the dough onto a floured surface, dust lightly with flour and knead quickly for about 30 seconds. Be light with your biscuit dough! You want to incorporate the ingredients but you don’t want to knead it so long that your fat bits all melt; this will result in a denser product that is more like bread than biscuit.
Use a rolling pin to roll the dough to about 1/4″ thickness, then fold the dough as many times as you can. Roll out again to 1/2″ thickness and then cut with a biscuit cutter or a cup (I used a coffee mug).
Use all your dough, combining the pieces and rolling again to 1/2″ thickness so you get a complete a biscuit out of what is left. For the last bit of dough that’s too small for cutting, I just mush it together with my hands so I use ALL the dough.
Place biscuits on an oiled baking sheet and bake about 12 to 15 minutes at 400F, or until the tops are nicely browned a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the biscuits comes out clean.
And be sure to eat one hot out of the oven, slathered in butter. Yummers!
