Southeast London Buttermilk Biscuits

My adapted recipe. Doing dry measures with a scale just makes so much more sense than with cups.

Start with a cup of milk. Add a tablespoon or so of chardonnay vinegar and let it sit for about five minutes. If you don't have chardonnay vinegar, use regular vinegar or a slightly larger amount of lemon juice, but chardonnay vinegar is best. Steer clear of balsamic or apple cider vinegar, and whatever you do, don't waste your time looking for buttermilk in London. It's not there. Then give it a quick stir—it should be thick.

Then:

Single recipe. Doubling may or may not require exactly the same amount of buttermilk, depending on whether or not Mars is in retrograde.

250 g plain flour
85 g butter—frozen, grated like cheese.
¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Tools:
cheese grater
big bowl
sieve for flour. Sifters are dumb.
scale and other measuring devices
whatever baking pans your landlady left you
clean wooden counter-top. If you have Formica counter-tops, have your kitchen re-appointed before continuing.

See what I didn't include there? A spoon. Yeaaaah.

Preheat your crappy-ass oven to gas mark 8, otherwise known as the “who needs eyebrows?” setting. Due to the nature of your crappy-ass oven, you'll have to rotate your ungreased cookie sheets at least once to ensure the ones in the back don't burn and the ones in the front actually get cooked, so you'll let all the heat out and they won't rise properly. If your oven has a window, watch the ones in the back rise beautifully for the first five minutes, then start to fall when the temperature drops. How like life.

If you'd rather have biscuits that rise nicely, buy an electric oven, install it, and set it to 450 F, 230 C, or self-cleaning mode. Or try to jerry-rig some sort of lazy Susan type device on the top rack. Might work. Refrain from using duct tape or plastic components, particularly if you're baking at night, so as to avoid waking up the whole damn neighbourhood when you burn your kitchen down.

Working with your hands, mix the dry ingredients. Add the butter last, in small handfuls, breaking up any clumps that form as you go. Make sure the butter is nice and incorporated throughout the flour mixture before you add the faux buttermilk but pull your hands out while it's still cold. Add only as much buttermilk as necessary—this amount will change based on the humidity and the movements of Saturn—to make the dough stick together without becoming gloppy. Incorporate only as much as you have to. Do not knead. Scrape the biscuit-worth of dough off your fingers. Dump out on a hella well-floured countertop—use your sieve to snow out a nice even layer—and pat into something resembling a circle, a little over half an inch thick. Do not roll out or pat to less than a half inch in thickness, as the biscuits will come out flat and lame. Pressing straight down, use a 2 inch-diameter biscuit cutter to hack the dough into rough circles, or whatever shape they wind up as. Instead of re-forming the offcuts into another cut-able disc, just throw them on the pan. You're not gonna serve them to the f'ing queen and everybody loves offcuts. Bake for 10-20 minutes, depending on the lunar phase, and remove when most of them are golden brown on top.

Yields about 8 good-sized biscuits, plus another biscuit or two worth of offcuts. I promise this is preferable to 10 biscuits, 2 of which are puck-esque.

Serve with apricot jam, orange marmalade, mozzarella and sliced tomatoes, eggs, baked beans, black pudding, or whatever you have laying around. They'll probably go well.

If you get a chance, serve them alongside a basket of scones and thumb your nose at your friends and family by proving that no, they are not the same. There's nothing particularly wrong with scones, but biscuits they ain't.