I’ll always remember waking up to my dad’s homemade biscuits on weekend mornings, tired and sleepy, but somehow already salivating at the idea of digging in. And while the biscuits looked utterly uniform and perfect, my dad always appeared tired and disheveled. Once, when I asked him why he looked so beat, he explained how he had to get up early to make enough biscuits for the whole family, sometimes rising before the sun even came up.
I’m sure we’ve all been there—wanting to prepare a home-cooked breakfast feast for friends and family but shuddering at the idea of how early we’d have to set our alarms. If you love serving up smiles and sleeping in, Ina Garten has just the trick.
Ina Garten’s Best Biscuit Tips
No more getting up at 4 a.m. to start our breakfast bakes! Garten has several biscuit tips worth adopting (more on those below), but her best one for easy morning entertaining is to make your biscuit dough the night before, a trick she learned while running her specialty shop, Barefoot Contessa.
In a clip from her Food Network show, Garten is seen making buttermilk Cheddar biscuits from scratch, up until it’s time to put them in the oven. Instead of baking them right away, she places the prepared dough on a baking sheet and chills the biscuits in the fridge overnight before baking them (at a reasonable hour!) the next day.
In addition to preparing the dough ahead, Garten’s cardinal rule for baking a perfect batch of biscuits comes down to the temperature of certain ingredients. It’s “incredibly important” to keep your butter, eggs, and milk super cold. This ensures that when the butter in the biscuits meets the hot oven, it’ll create steam, which allows the biscuits to puff up. While some people might go as far as freezing their flour, Garten says that’s “a little extreme,” even for her.
And these aren’t the only biscuit-making secrets Garten spills on the episode. In addition to preparing the dough ahead of time, which saves you the hassle of waking up early, and opting for extra cold ingredients, here are three other tips the Barefoot Contessa has for scrumptious cheesy biscuits.
- Baking powder is key: Garten advises adding a tablespoon of baking powder, which’ll result in “really light and flaky biscuits,” she says. “Seems like a lot, but it’s really worth it.”
- Keep cheese from clumping with flour: Before mixing her box-grated Cheddar in with the rest of her ingredients, she reaches for a small handful of flour, “just a tablespoon or so,” so that the Cheddar won’t clump in the biscuits. She puts the flour and the Cheddar in a separate bowl, mixes them together, and then adds them to the rest of her ingredients.
- You don’t have to use a biscuit cutter: Once her dough is prepared, she rolls it out into a 1/2- to 3/4-inch-thick rectangle on her floured work surface. Instead of going through the trouble of using a biscuit cutter, Garten saves time by simply cutting them into eight equal-ish pieces with a knife, which she also flours, to prevent the dough from sticking to it. This gives the biscuits a “homemade” aesthetic that’s sure to charm.
Whether you’re hosting a festive weekend brunch for your friends and family or simply craving flaky biscuits without the early alarm, fall back on these simple, stress-saving tips, and you’ll be enjoying a hot, buttery biscuit in no time.
