It’s time to start thinking about Turkey Day dishes again, and what better place to start than the bread basket? Because who doesn’t love a light, fluffy, sweet, and spicy bread product when the holidays roll around? Heck, who doesn’t love a light, fluffy, sweet, and spicy bread product when tonight’s dinner rolls around? And what if we add crumbled bacon to that bread product? Even better. E V E N B E T T E R.
The key to light and fluffy biscuits is small chunks of cold butter in your batter. The cold butter melts during the baking process, coating the glutens in the flour as it does so. The steam produced by the butter also helps to separate the layers of dough, and this results in our light, fluffy, tender biscuit. Please note the chunks of butter in the before photo below.
Take your cold stick of butter (it doesn’t hurt to stick it in the freezer for 5 minutes before starting this process either), slice it in half lengthwise, then slice those halves lengthwise into 4 roughly equal pieces for a total of 8 long slices of butter. Cut those 8 butter strips crosswise into pea-sized pieces, and viola! One step closer to flaky, tender biscuits.
Ingredients
- 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- ¼ cup (packed) dark brown sugar
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
- ½ cup freshly grated cheddar cheese
- ½ cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter
- ¼ cup milk
- ¾ cup cooked sweet potato flesh {see note}
- 4 ounces (approximately 4 slices) bacon, cooked to desired doneness and crumbled
- 1 tablespoon milk
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line a 10 by 15-inch rimmed baking pan with parchment paper, and dust it lightly with flour.
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, thyme, salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes.
- Add the grated cheddar cheese, tossing it with the flour mixture so that the strands of cheese remain separate. This flour coating on the cheese will allow for it to be better distributed throughout the biscuits.
- Cut the butter into roughly pea-sized cubes (as described above), toss those cubes into the flour mixture, then stir the butter into the flour (your fingers work just fine for this task) to insure that the butter is evenly distributed throughout the flour mixture, smooshing any larger pieces of butter flat in order to avoid gaping holes in your biscuits where butter once was.
- Pour in the milk, and stir it in. Add the sweet potato flesh and bacon, and work that into the dough using a sturdy spoon or spatula. This will take a little bit of effort, though in just a few minutes, all dry ingredients will be incorporated into the dough, at which point, you’ll want to form the dough into a ball, patting any protruding butter or bacon back to level with the rest of the dough.
- Place your ball of dough on the lightly floured parchment paper, dust your hands with flour, and flatten the dough out to a 12-inch round that is approximately 1 ½ –inches thick. Use a 2 ½-inch round biscuit cutter to form 8 biscuits, folding any scraps together and incorporate them back into the main dough in order to get 8 biscuits from the dough. I find that sometimes that 8th biscuit is formed a little more like a meatball by hand, then flattened top and bottom to match the others.
- Alternatively, you can form the dough into a 12 by 4-inch rectangle that is roughly 1 ½-inches thick, then cut the dough into (8) 3 by 2-inch rectangles, to avoid the folding in of dough scraps as in the round versions.
- Place the biscuits at least 2-inches apart on the parchment paper, then brush them lightly with the milk.
- Bake until the biscuits are golden brown, 20 to 22 minutes. Remove them from the oven, and allow them to cool for at least 5 minutes before serving them forth.
Notes
The biscuits will keep 2 to 3 days in an airtight container, and may also be frozen and used within a month.
To get ¾ cup sweet potato flesh, pierce a ¾ to 1-pound sweet potato all over with a fork, wrap it tightly in aluminum foil, place it in a baking dish, and roast at 350°F until the potato is completely soft, 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes. Allow the potato to cool completely before making the biscuits, then scoop the flesh out of the skin with a spoon.
If you'd prefer baconless biscuits, just go ahead and omit the bacon. All will still be good - and vegetarian as well.
D E L I C I O U S !
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