high-bar baking

Nine biscuits is a lot for little old living-alone me. Even when I dump half of them onto somebody else, that’s still quite a few biscuits sitting around my apartment getting staler by the day. 

But the last step in Lagerstrom’s killer biscuit recipe is to freeze the dough for twenty minutes while the oven preheats. The idea being, your butter should be as cold as possible before baking so it stays separate from the flour and converts to steam and flaky layers in the oven. I asked, what’s the philosophical difference, then, between freezing the dough for a few minutes and freezing it for a lot of minutes? 

The answer: not much. I kept two in the freezer for a week (froze them solid separately, then bagged them once the risk of them sticking to each other had passed) and then baked them off when I felt like it. It took a little bit longer, of course, but they were stellar. I couldn’t tell the difference. When they were baking it looked like a lot of butter was leaking out of them, but by the time they were golden it seems like the butter had been reabsorbed in the process of frying the bottom. What a terrible side effect, I know. So, don’t panic if you see butter on the tray; it’ll sort itself out.

One more reminder, be sure to trim the edges of the biscuit slab before you cut it into nine pieces. Brian’s video mentions it, but the written recipe omits that step. It’s not the end of the world (if you’re a crispy-crunchy nibbles person, you might even prefer it that way), but making clean cuts on all the edges frees the layers to rise as high as they can. The craggy edges pinch and glue together otherwise, limiting the fullest height to the freer middle. Notice the difference between the front biscuit and the one behind it to the right.