Whole Wheat ‘Oh Crap I Don’t Have Buttermilk’ Biscuits

Tidbits:

I got excited about making biscuits for breakfast this morning (mostly because I had nothing else to eat). I’m doing my thing and I get to the last ingredient, buttermilk. Who normally has buttermilk on hand? Not me…so I was going to just substitute with some regular milk and see what happened, until Scott saw the sour cream. He was like, “why don’t we use this instead?” Good idea Scotty. So I mixed milk and sour cream. That’ll do pig.

The recipe is now adapted from one of my favorite cook books that I got from a restaurant I ate at in New York (mentioned here).They had the best biscuits ever and while I feel like mine don’t come out as good, they are still pretty darn tasty! So a couple things…

1. Make sure your shortening and butter are cold.
2. You can fool around with the flour proportions. As in, if you don’t want wheat biscuits (but you should because they are really good this way) you can use only all purpose flour. Alternatively you can use only wheat flour also, but it might get just a tad too crumbly.

Ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 tsp salt

2 tbsp. baking powder

1 1/2 Tbsp sugar

3 tbsp cold butter

3 tbsp cold vegetable shortening

1/2 cup milk (I used 2%)

1/4 cup light sour cream

(for the buttermilk biscuits replace the milk and sour cream with buttermilk)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl and stir
3. In your stand mixer (or with an electric mixer),  on slow speed, add the butter and shortening and mix until the butter and shortening are approximately the size of a pea (the dough is still very loose at this point)
4. Add the milk and sour cream (or 3/4 cup buttermilk if you happen to have it) and stir just until combined (don’t over mix!)
5. Knead the dough on a well floured surface 2-3 times
6. Flatten the dough out so that it is about 1/2 – 3/4 of an inch thick
7. Cut with biscuit cutter (or I just use a cookie cutter). I heard its important not to “twist” the cutter when your making them, but I don’t actually know why. So push down and pull straight up. I usually get about 4 biscuits from the first “flattening”
8. Recombine the dough and repeat until you’ve used it all
9. Lay the biscuits on a baking sheet with parchment paper that has been lightly floured
10. Bake for 15-16 minutes
11. Serve with honey, jam, or whatever you fancy 🙂