Kendra Makes Thanksgiving Stuffing Biscuits

It's like, so pillowy,

really delightful fluffy texture with these awesome

like, look at that.

A flake just fully peeled off.

Incredible.

[bright music]

Today, we're making stuffing biscuits,

which are kind of exactly what they sound like.

All the flavors of stuffing packed

into a flaky buttermilk biscuit.

Your woodsy herbs like rosemary and sage,

some scallion, some fennel seeds, some black pepper.

This is from the menu that I developed

for the November issue of Bon Appetit

called Thanksgiving Simplified

where every single recipe has 10 ingredients or less.

First thing we're gonna do is measure out our flour

and we're gonna whisk in a little bit of sugar,

which doesn't make the biscuits sweet,

but it does balance out all of these herby flavors.

You need a little bit of sugar in there

to help you out with that.

A little bit of salt, some baking powder and baking soda,

which just helps with the rise.

Plus a lot of freshly cracked black pepper.

So we're just gonna whisk

all of those dry ingredients together

and whisk for a little longer than you think.

You know, there might be clumps.

There might be hidden little pockets

that are a lot of, you know, baking powder in one bit.

So really go for like 30 seconds

to a minute of whisking here,

even though that feels like overkill.

And now we're gonna do all of our mixing prep.

The scallion is offering us that like, oniony, alliumy bite.

So there's usually onion in some form

or an allium in some form in your stuffing.

And to get that into a biscuit, really the best way

to do that is with scallion,

which doesn't need to be cooked first.

Rosemary and Sage are like traditional Thanksgiving,

fall autumnal cooking flavors.

To make this a very celebratory biscuit,

you want those smells that are going to like,

place you at the Thanksgiving table.

My trick for cutting sage, stack them biggest on the bottom

and then smallest on the top,

roll it up and then just slice it from there.

I'm also just gonna add the fennel into this bowl.

In stuffing, you might use actual fennel.

You might use fennel seeds.

You might use a fennel laced sausage.

So getting this seed in the biscuit is like,

that's like a clutch thing.

You like, gotta have it.

Now we're gonna do our butter.

Butter's gotta be cold because what you want

is for the butter layers to stay distinct from the flour.

And we're gonna cut this into pretty small pieces.

We are using unsalted butter.

Salted butter is great.

There's a lot of great applications for it,

but unsalted butter means you can be

a little bit more precise with the end result saltiness

of your baked good because you're adding the salt.

So first we're just gonna toss all the butter pieces

in the flour so that each is individually coated

and then you're gonna go through and just smash

each butter piece flat.

After I've smashed them all, I like,

run them through my hand like this and you create

these like, beautiful little flakes of butter

and those flakes are gonna be what separates

all your layers of flour and that steam as it melts

is what creates all those flakes and all those like,

pull apart-y layers of a good biscuit.

And that's why we're not using a food processor

'cause that would just create little crumbles.

And here we really want the leafs, the shards of butter.

And now we're gonna add all our fun stuff.

Scallions, sage, Rosemary, fennel seed,

and just incorporate that with your hands.

And this whole time we've been keeping our buttermilk

in the refrigerator because we want that to be

as cold as possible.

So cold and nice and pre-portioned for me, magical.

We just wanna bring this together.

It doesn't have to be like, too cohesive

or like, a beautiful whatever.

You're just bringing it together into a shaggy dough.

I like to use a fork for this

because it really gives the dough

some space to move around.

So the buttermilk, you get that

like, characteristic tang, right in that flavor,

which you really want, but also the acid of the buttermilk

and the baking soda is what will react to create the lift.

And now we're just bringing everything together, right?

There's some wet bits and there's some dry bits

and you're just kinda like folding to incorporate

all the odds and ends into one dough.

Stirring too much in the bowl is like overworking it.

I'd rather just like fold them together

when they're out on the surface

than risk mixing for too long in the bowl.

Okay so now that we're basically like one big guy,

we're gonna pat it out.

We're helping create these layers

by sneaking them in however we can

and the way I like to do that is stick them

on top of each other.

Like, keep doing this a few times where

all the layers of one half

get mashed against all the layers of the other half

and you're just duplicating and duplicating

and duplicating layers.

And you can even see like, those layers

really starting to form here.

Okay, we're gonna do this one more time.

So now we're forming our rectangle

and I'm just using my hands.

You don't need to use a rolling pin here.

So we're gonna do four across three down.

So you can just divide and then divide again

for this direction and then this way you can go three.

So nice.

And then what I do,

because I want everything to be pretty is

I will pat each cube on the corners to just like,

make sure we've got like a perfect little, little square.

And then we're gonna transfer them

to this parchment paper lined baking sheet.

And then we are gonna pop this in the freezer

for like 10 minutes and that's just gonna

solidify the butter, keep it nice and cold

before you pop it in the oven

and it's like shocked into the heat.

All right, fresh from the freezer, cold little biscuits.

And now we're just gonna finish them off

with a little bit of buttermilk brushed on top.

That's just gonna help with browning in the oven.

We are gonna throw these in the oven at 425

for about 25 minutes and what you wanna do

is just rotate your pan halfway through

so that you really get even cooking on all sides.

It's not like super brown from one side

if you have a hot spot in your oven,

like those biscuits will be way,

done way faster than the others.

Like, you just want to account for any irregularities

that might be happening in your oven.

All right, I checked on these guys and they are ready to go,

about a minute early,

but you gotta check 'cause every oven is different.

Ooh, hot. Okay.

So you can see they're in nice and golden brown.

This recipe, it's like,

it's very green on the inside and it gets

like, nice and dark on top.

It's so delightful.

So you can see these really nice layers here.

This one's so fun.

Look at all these layers here on the side.

This is like exactly what you want

on your Thanksgiving table.

It just really has all of the flavor that you could want.

It just literally like, falls open.

Little bit of butter on there, which is almost like,

do you need it?

I mean like you want it, but do you need it?

Mm, it's so good.

Like, the outside is just crisp enough,

but not like crunchy, you know?

And the inside is so flaky and tender

and so full of all of these flavors.

Those woodsy herbs are really nice.

You can really taste the sage.

The fennel seeds are my favorite part because that flavor

feels so stuffing to me and it really comes through.

And then the scallions are like,

a little bit of something fresh in there.

I want this with my turkey, but then I really want it

for breakfast with gravy.

So maybe like make a double batch

so that you definitely have leftovers

and then you can use it with your leftover gravy

the next day.

It really tastes like stuffing.

[Man] What do you wanna leave people with?

Mm, what do I want to leave people with?

Okay.

[laughs] I'm like, I'll say something

and then I stuffed my mouth full of biscuit.