Our favorite biscuit!

This has, hands-down, been our favorite biscuit recipe for years now. It's a modification of Bob's Red Mill gluten free buttermilk biscuit recipe (https://www.bobsredmill.com/recipes/how-to-make/buttermilk-biscuits-gluten-free-2/). I liked that as a base recipe but it never quite did it for me, the biscuits always came out a bit dry and folding the dough over on itself just wasn't really feasible given how sticky the dough is. So, I began making modifications based on tips and tricks I picked up way back in the early 2000's when we owned a cafe on the Oregon coast and I baked all the bread and pastries (way back before I had active celiac disease).

I spent a lot of time experimenting back then and many of the modifications that can be made to non-GF recipes also work for GF. One of the first things I did was to add flax meal. In baking, flax is excellent for binding moisture and since the biggest problem I had with this biscuit was that it dried out too much in the oven, flax works very well in it. I prefer golden flax to brown but that is primarily a matter of taste.

Next, the original biscuit recipe was more rubbery than I like. I suspected in this case it was too much egg. So, I replaced one of the eggs with a little cream cheese. However, it still felt a little heavy so I switched the cream cheese to ricotta cheese (for my purposes here, ricotta is cream cheese just made without the cream).

Lastly, I won't go into the chemical details of how baking powder vs. baking soda work as leavening agents but suffice to say that I increased the amount of buttermilk slightly to give a little more acidity for the baking soda which gives them just a bit more rise.

On to the recipe itself:

Dry ingredients Wet ingredients

2-1/2 cups Bob's RM 1-1 GF Baking Flour 1 cup buttermilk

2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg

1/2 teaspoon baking soda 2-1/2 tablespoons ricotta cheese

2 teaspoon to 2 tablespoon sugar (to taste)

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter cut in pea size chunks and frozen

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 450 F. If convection is available then I would suggest using it but reduce the oven temperature to 425 F.

2. Cut butter into pea size chunks and leave in freezer for a minimum of 15 minutes.

3. Combine all dry ingredients except butter.

4. Combine all wet ingredients and set aside.

5. Using a pastry cutter or by hand, cut butter into dry ingredients. I do this by dumping the butter chunks into the dry ingredients and stirring them around briefly so that they are well covered by the flour mixture. Then I quickly pinch/roll the butter chunks between my thumb and forefinger until they are flattened. After a few times this will create smaller chunks. The goal here is to have lots of small chunks of butter relatively evenly distributed throughout the flour. Don't spend too much time on this as you want the butter to stay chunky and not too soft or melted. Repeat this until the dry mixture looks the same as if a pastry cutter had been used (it should be coarse in appearance, not smooth).

6. Make a well in the middle and add wet ingredients. Mix using a wooden or plastic spoon. Eventually this will make a soft, somewhat sticky dough that holds together.

7. Turn the dough out onto a generously floured cookie sheet. Sprinkle a little more flour on top and with your hands, press the dough out to ~1 inch thickness. Fold the dough in half and add more flour to cookie sheet if needed. Sprinkle more flour on top if needed. Press the dough out to ~1 inch thick again. Fold in half as before.

8. Using your hands, shape the dough into a rectangle. Your dough should be anywhere from 1-1/2 to 2 inches tall. This isn't super important but keep in mind that since these are GF they won't rise much so get it pretty close to what you want the end result to be.

9. Using a knife or a pizza cutter, cut dough into 6 - 8 square or rectangular biscuits. Of course, you can also make the biscuits round (or whatever shape you want) and cut them out with any tool of your choice. I just prefer this method because there is no waste and no leftover dough to try to recombine and reshape (that doesn't work with this recipe).

10. Bake for ~15 minutes. Tops should be golden brown when done.

Enjoy!

* Note: There is a website (www.spinachtiger.com) which has a lot of keto and gluten free recipes on it. There is a recipe for a biscuit which is very, very similar to this one. There you can find an accompanying video in which the presenter uses the same technique as I do for cutting in the butter. So, if you're unsure about how to do that then watching their video can be very helpful. It can be found at https://spinachtiger.com/gluten-free-biscuit-fluffy/