Welcome to Bon Appétit Bake Club, a community of curious bakers. Each month senior test kitchen editors Jesse Szewczyk and Shilpa Uskokovic share a must-make recipe and dive deep on why it works. Come bake and learn with us—ask questions, share pics, listen to our podcast, and lots more here. And don't forget to join the Bake Club Group chat over on Substack.
We should all be baking more biscuits. A biscuit warm from the oven, split open and spread with a lick of butter (or pimento cheese, if one is lucky), rivals the pleasure of an exalted loaf of homemade bread, all for a mere fraction of the effort (and wait time). Add a half pound of sharp cheddar, as many layers as an onion, and a bit of seasoning that makes it taste like a bag of salty crab chips, and it’s immediately clear why these biscuits are mandatory for making. Old Bay seasoning, with roots in the Chesapeake Bay region of the US, features spices like celery salt, paprika, red pepper, and black pepper (among others not officially listed); it’s a savory, punchy, salty blend that goes just as well with seafood as it does with buttery biscuits.
Flaky biscuits are extra fun to make, as the dough gets folded in on itself a few times to trap the butter in between. In the oven, the layers blow apart and the result is a biscuit striated like fancy Italian marble. A food processor makes quick, light work of cutting the butter into the dry ingredients yielding ultra-tender biscuits; if you don’t have one, rub the butter in by hand, stopping to chill the mixture if the butter feels warm or melty at any moment. If it’s your first time making biscuits, know that the dough may seem a bit dry in the beginning. By the time you’ve made the last fold, it should have all come together nicely.