Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits

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There’s a scientific reason no one outside the South can nail them.

Amanda Mull

For 25 years in Georgia, I watched my mom make the same batch of six light, fluffy biscuits for breakfast almost every Sunday. Then I moved to New York, never to see a light, fluffy biscuit again. I arrived in the city in 2011, just in time for southern food to get trendy outside its region, and for three years, I bit into a series of artisanal hockey pucks, all advertised on menus as authentic southern buttermilk biscuits.

With every dense, dry, flat, scone-adjacent clump of carbohydrates, I became more distressed. I didn’t even realize biscuits could be bad, given how abundant good ones were in the South. Even my mom, a reluctant-at-best cook, made them every week without batting an eyelash. The recipe she used had been on my dad’s side of the family for at least three generations.

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I asked my mom to email me the recipe, and it was three ingredients (self-rising flour, shortening, and buttermilk), mashed together with a fork. I’m not an accomplished baker, but I cook frequently, and this was the kind of recipe that had long been used by people without a lot of money, advanced kitchen tools, or fancy ingredients. Confident that I could pull it off, I marched right out and bought the ingredients. The result: biscuits that were just as terrible as all the other ones in New York. Not to be dramatic, but my failure destabilized my identity a little bit. What kind of southerner can’t make biscuits?

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The crux of this problem is a brand called White Lily, whose name and logo is familiar to virtually all southerners but foreign to most people outside the region. White Lily was founded in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1883, and although other contemporary brands now make serviceable biscuit flour, it still dominates grocery baking aisles across the Southeast. Biscuits are now as common an inexpensive staple bread in southern diets as bagels or kaiser rolls are in New York, but for generations of rural, working-class southerners, they were a luxurious treat. “When my grandmother in western North Carolina said bread, she meant cornbread,” Phillips told me. “The biscuits were a special thing. We’d have them on Sundays.”

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https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/11/better-biscuits-south-thanksgiving/576526/

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Okay, I might bite the bullet and order a bag of White Lily flour. I've never made a decent biscuit in my life which has always bugged me. I'm not bragging, but friends and family have told me that I'm one of the best cooks they've ever met. I come by it honestly because both my mom & dad were the best cooks I'd ever met. However, my biscuits are these rock-hard disasters that even the local squirrels and raccoons scoff at. It's worth a try...

[patricia92243]

1. My grandmother, mother, me, and my daughter use White Lilly.

It really does make all the difference in the world. We also use Crisco shortening.

[irisblue]

2. Also water. I bet NYC has, even filtered, it's own mix of dissolved minerals

Catbyte, consider your water in the biscuits.

[Major Nikon]

3. Just look for pastry flour at your local market

White Lily A/P flour is actually more like pastry flour than A/P. King Arthur A/P flour has around 12% protein content. White Lily is around 9%. Pastry flour is around 9%.

I usually make biscuits out of whole wheat pastry flour, but whole wheat flour is not going to be as fluffy as more processed white flour.

[Demsrule86]

4. I make gluten free biscuits now and it took some effort but now they are perfect ...light and fluffy

My Mom was Southern but she hated cooking ...cooked out of a box as did many in her generation...my Grandma taught me. You want to use a light hand and not mess to much with them...for gluten free I don't roll them out but shape them and dops them in a baking pan for the best rise.

[dem in texas]

5. My Mother-in-Law's recipe for biscuits

Beatrice's Baking Powder Biscuits

Here is a recipe for light, fluffy biscuits as made by my late mother-in-law. She instructed me until I was finally able to duplicate her wonderful biscuits. Beatrice used lard in her dough and I have changed the recipe to call for vegetable shortening. She also used self-rising flour and it works very well. If you use self-rising flour, omit the baking powder and salt.

Preheat oven to 450˚

2 cups flour 1/3 cup shortening
4 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together and place in mixing bowl. With your spoon, make a “hole” in the center of the flour mixture. Put the shortening and milk in the hole and using a large spoon start gradually working the milk and shortening into the flour. Continue until the milk and shortening are completely mixed with the flour. You should have soft sticky dough.

Turn the dough out on a heavily floured breadboard or waxed paper and knead a minute or so, working in a little flour. Sprinkle flour over the dough and roll out with a rolling pin. Cut into rounds using a biscuit cutter. Place the rounds on a greased baking sheet. For softer, higher biscuits, place rounds so they touch closely. For crisper biscuits, place them further apart.

Bake in a hot oven (450°) for 12 to 15 minutes until browned on top. Serve with butter, jam and honey.