Molly Makes Sour Cream and Onion Biscuits at Home

Test, test, testing, one, two three!

Okay here I am.

Bon Appetit, sour cream and onion biscuits.

Molly, take one.

[Ben] I love it.

[jazz music]

Hey everyone, I'm Molly and I am here on day,

shit, I already [bleep] it up.

Hey everyone, I'm Molly.

It is week four of working from home.

So I'm in my home kitchen today

and I'm gonna show you how to make

sour cream and onion biscuits.

This is a recipe that came out right around

the time that everyone started to work from home

so I've been seeing a lot of you making them already.

But for those of you who haven't made it yet,

most of the ingredients are already in your pantries

and it's pretty riffable.

But, before we do that, I have a special guest joining

me today, my Dad, who is on the other side of the country

staying safe in upstate New York.

We haven't seen each other in six or eight weeks.

So he's gonna make the biscuits today also

from his home kitchen and then we'll have

a biscuit together at the end.

Wow, look at that!

Oh, did we lose him?

Dad?

Oh, there you are, hi dad.

Hi, honey.

Do you wanna show us around

your kitchen a little bit, dad?

Sure! I'm guessing mom

cleaned the shit out of it [laughs].

Yes she did, yes she did.

There we are, nice stove.

[Doug] And I've been well trained,

so I have my stuff out and ready here.

Have you ever made biscuits from scratch?

I don't think so.

You have the recipe on basically, with the tutorials.

I'll call you back in a little while

and see where things are at and we'll go from there!

All right, let's do this.

Okay, I love you and I'll see you in a little bit.

Okay, good luck with yours.

Oh thank you, I'm not super worried about it [laughs].

All right, bye. Okay, bye.

Okay, I have eight scallions here.

I'm going to trim the like hairy, nubbly ends of,

and discard those 'cause they're not super tasty.

You'll also wanna take a look at the green

ends of the scallions, and make sure that there aren't any

either bruised, brown or wilty green ends,

but if they all look super nice and green,

leave them on because we're gonna utilize

this entire scallion in the biscuit.

And then thinly slicing them crosswise.

Whoa, and my eyes are watering, whoa.

So for the dry ingredients, I'm grabbing a big bowl,

and I'm gonna whisk together two and a half cups of flour

and I'm gonna show you the proper way to measure flour

because a lot of people I think take their measuring cup

and they dig it into the bowl of flour

and then it comes back half full and then they dig again

and every time that you do that you're compacting the flour

down into your measuring cup which means you're actually

measuring more flour per cup than you would otherwise.

So the proper way to measure four is to,

from a large bowl of flour, fluff the flour up

with a fork or a spoon and then gently spoon it into

your measuring cup like this.

And that'll give you the most accurate measurement.

So I'm gonna do this again, four two and a half cups

total flour, so there's two, two and a half.

So we're gonna keep this on standby, this is called bench

flour which basically means extra flour that you'll use

to dust your work surface or your bench

as you're folding the dough.

The rest of the dry ingredients that

are gonna get whisked into this are,

two and a half teaspoons of diamond kosher salt,

one and a quarter teaspoons of sugar,

it's there for flavor not really for sweetness.

A half a teaspoon of baking soda,

one and three quarters teaspoon of baking powder.

Text from dad, the entire scallions,

stem to stem question mark?

Answer, yes.

At this point, I'm gonna add a teaspoon of freshly ground

black pepper and the reason that it's important to grind

your pepper freshly every time is that

the stuff that's pre-ground was ground who knows how long

ago months maybe years ago,

and there's really no flavor, aroma or heat left in that.

So, you want it to be as fresh as possible.

And then just whisking all that together so that

the leveners, salt, sugar, pepper are all evenly

distributed throughout the flour, and set it aside.

There's a lot of butter in these biscuits.

There is actually 10 tablespoons of butter,

but that's what makes them so tender, so moist and so flaky.

I'm taking 10 tablespoons from this package

so eight tablespoons is one stick,

so about that, another two tablespoons is 10.

We're gonna reserve another two tablespoons

for melting and brushing over the biscuits later on.

And I just pulled this butter out of the fridge

because it's imperative that your butter be as cold

as possible the cold butter is going to melt in the oven

and as it melts, it's goin' to create steam

and that steam will force the biscuits to rise up

and will actually like physically create those striated

flaky layers so that's why we do this.

And now I'm gonna add them into the flour mixture.

At this point I'm gonna work the butter into the flour

by pinching and squeezing my fingers

and sort of like smashing and flattening the butter

into the flour mixture as I go.

It takes a couple of minutes so stick with it,

you wanna work as quickly as possible

because again, your hands are warm,

they'll warm the butter,

so the faster you get this job done,

the colder your butter will be.

In a couple of minutes you'll see that they're all

broken down to about the size of a pea.

Obviously it's okay if they're not all exactly the same size

you just don't want any chunks that are still

the size of the cubes when they started,

those will actually take too long to melt in the oven

and you'll end up having like a greasy biscuit.

But it'll start to look kind of sandy in here.

And that's what we're lookin' for!

So the butter is now cut into the flour as they say.

Now we're going to add the scallions

and you can just use your hands to sort of fluff

them all together and now I'm going to make a well

and I'm adding one and a quarter cups of sour cream.

And now taking a fork, working in a circular motion,

I'm incorporating the flour into the sour cream mixture

little by little and eventually these very large clumps

are gonna start to form as the sour cream hydrates

the flour and butter mixture and turns it into a dough.

I'm gonna grab that bench flour that we talked about earlier

flour my hands, flour the bench,

and using floured hands I'm just gonna kind of

knead it into a slightly more manageable mass

in the bowl before turning it out.

And don't leave any of that behind because

it'll all get worked in.

So we have our mass and I am patting it down,

and just kind of incorporating any loose floury bits.

And I'm patting it into a very rough eight by four inch

rectangle you're looking for about an inch thick overall.

But basically what you're doing here is forming it into

a rectangle that can then be folded.

So taking one side of the letter and folding it in

and then taking the other side of the letter

and folding that in, and now smashing that down.

SO basically just like forcing a layer upon layer

of dough to ensure that we get that nice flaky lift.

And now I'm patting it down into the same size,

eight by four inch-ish rectangle.

One side in, other side in.

Bench flour, boom, boom, boom, and then patting it back

into an eight by four, one last time.

Okay, this feels pretty good to me.

And now using a floured knife so that it doesn't stick,

I'm gonna cut this lengthwise into two equal logs.

Separate those two logs, flour again.

And then cut each of these logs into four biscuits.

Okay, so I'm just pattin' 'em right back into a square.

These are going on a parchment-lined baking sheet.

That remaining two tablespoons of butter that

we set aside earlier, is just getting melted very gently

so that we can brush it on top of the biscuits

and that will give them like a nice buttery, crispy sheen.

In the mean time I'm just gonna clean up a teansie bit.

[jazz music]

[ball squeaking]

Uh-oh, so the butter is melted.

I do not have a pastry brush,

but it's nothing we can't solve.

I'm gonna take a spoon and just spoon the melted butter

over each one, and then I'm gonna use a clean finger

to spread it around to make sure it's evenly coated

and honestly even the back of a spoon will work.

And then here's another thing,

I don't have molden salt.

But I do have a Himalayan pink salt grinder.

So, we're doin' pink salt today

and that's just a little like crunchy, textural salty finish

All right, these are going into a 425 degree oven

for 18 to 22 minutes depending on how hot your oven is

how big it is, so we'll keep an eye on them.

Okay, let's check in on Doug Baz.

There he is!

Okay, here we go.

I know that you've often talked about working

cooking clean is that the expression?

I just said it.

That's not my jam, not with flour I guess.

Why aren't you wearing an apron you crazy man?

[Doug] I'm gonna take this off.

No, don't do it.

I'm gonna take this off. Oh my God.

[laughs] Oh my God!

You totally set my up for that [laughs].

Okay.

God, you're the most embarrassing.

I'll show you my biscuits now.

Oh dad, how come there's only six of them?

I don't know, I just cut.

I like 'em bigger.

Okay. I like 'em bigger.

Oh it was very intentional.

Yes.

And you did the letter folding technique?

I did it three times, yeah.

I'm ready. They look great.

Okay, and you put flaky salt on top of those?

[Doug] Flaky salt and melted butter.

Perfect, okay throw them in the oven,

it's preheated. Preheated, yep.

Throw them in there and,

mine are in the oven too, I'll show you.

I'll give you a quick sneak peak.

Here's mine, they're in the oven.

Ooo!

Nice.

Okay dad, so your timers set.

Let's chat when they're out of the oven.

Okay.

Don't eat one without me, okay?

Okay, I won't.

Okay, see ya in a bit. Bye!

Okay so it has been, 22 minutes which is on

the upper end of the range that you'll see

on he recipe, that's because this oven that I'm cooking

with here runs a little bit lower in temperature

than the one that I cook with in the test kitchen

which is super powerful, so get to know

your own oven and don't pull them out until

they look golden brown and delicious.

I'm gonna give you a little look inside the oven.

There they are.

They're nice and fluffy,

golden on top and around the edges.

And they look finished!

Now we're gonna check back in with my dad

and we're gonna have ourselves a biscie!

There he is!

Yours out? Mine are out,

are yours out?

Yeah.

Let me see.

Lookin' good, dad.

Can you pick up a hero biscuit for me?

Nice separation of layers, they look fluffy.

[Doug] They feel very, they're very light.

Yeah! I'm surprised given

how big they are.

When do we get to eat them?

Right now, let's go for it.

Okay, I'm cracking in.

[Doug] Oh yeah!

You see that steam?

[Doug] Oh.

And I like to put a little extra flaky sea salt

on once the butters on there too.

Cheers!

Thanks for making biscuits with me, dad.

[Doug] My pleasure, really.

[Ben] We can't see ya, Doug.

Oh. There he is, he's back.

I made an extra one.

Uh-oh.

I knew you were up to something.

[laughs] Oh my God, dad.

Can ya see it? Yeah, I can see it.

So the backstory here,

is that growing up, when we would have biscuits,

the Bisquick biscuits in the morning,

he would always shape them into the first

initial of our names so I always had an M biscuit

in the morning so now I understand where

those other two missing biscuits went.

Another trick up your sleeve [laughs].

That's where they went. Hi, honey.

Hi mom, you let him do that?

I didn't know, I didn't know about either of his surprises

these were middle of the night--

He always has something up his sleeve.

It was easy though too, right?

Oh absolutely, yeah.

It was a piece of cake, so to speak.

A piece of biscuit. Of biscuit.

Piece of biscuit.

All right well, love you mom,

I'm gonna share the rest of the biscuits with Ben

and Tunes. Okay.

I love you!

[Doug] Keep up the good work, I love you.

Bye! Kay, talk soon.

[Jill] How long is this stuff gonna take?

They're still on.

Let's see, I have to get off of this somehow.

[Jill] End the call.