INGREDIENTS

700g Flour + 1 tb Garlic Powder

400g Buttermilk (350g Milk + 50g Vinegar)

250g Cold Butter - Cubed

400g Sharp Cheddar Cheese - Cubed

1/2 Wedge of Parm (Optional)*

15g Salt (about 2 tsp of salt)

2tsp Baking Powder

1tsp Baking Soda

1 Whole Leek or 6 jalapenos

200*C/ 400*F for 20 mins

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat the oven to 200*C or 400*F

You want to start with the buttermilk if you don’t have buttermilk cus it needs to sit for a minute and curdle. Just add the vinegar to the milk and leave it on the counter while you get everything else ready. If you have actual buttermilk, never mind.

Go ahead and mix your garlic powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt and flour together. I usually recommend adding all the leavening to the flour and setting it aside as a dry mix because I am personally prone to forgetting something. It happens more than it should. Also, this way, we can add our butter directly to our dry ingredients.

Now let’s get our cheese ready. If you have a food processor, that would probably be the easiest way to go about this, but I don’t have one so I just cubed mine into little nuggets, a quarter of the size of my butter. It was actually really good cus the biscuit had little cheddar chunks that kept its shape even after its bake. Also, if you want to be extra, I would grate about half a wedge of parm right now too. Parm adds an additional salty sharpness that gives it a flavor boost, but these are delicious without so don’t worry if you don’t have any or don’t want to. Set aside the cheese.

I love to use leek, which gives this biscuit a beautiful garlicky / oniony savoryness. I generally discard an inch of the rough green end. Slice the rest and then subREPLACE in salt water, which adds more flavor to the leek and helps to soften the tough leek just a little. This is how I wash my leek. By agitating it in salt water. You’ll see dirt and grit fall to the bottom of the bowl. In this batch, I used 3 jalapenos because I didn’t have enough but I would personally make them again with 6, but I prefer things very spicy. If you want something jalapeno adjacent but without spice, anaheim peppers might be a good sub. I cut the stems off my jalapenos, cut them lengthwise and cut them lengthwise again before chopping them up into small bits. Set aside.

We want to cube our very cold butter like we would for a pie dough. Cold butter means flaky, puffy pastry that releases steam as it bakes in a hot oven. I like to lay my butter on its skinny long side and take my bench scraper to cut it lengthwise, then turn it so its on large long side and cut it lengthwise again. Then make cuts the other way. We’re trying to get 1 inch cubes. In the UK, 250g of butter is one block so this recipe is based around that.

Add cubed butter to dry mix. Shake the butter around so it is well-coated in flour and then give the butter cubes one smash with your fingers so they are more like little flattened butter sheets.

Now add the buttermilk, cheese and jalapenos. Mix everything just until it comes together into a shaggy dough. (By now the milk + vinegar should be a foamy/ thick consistency. That’s what we’re looking for.) Add a light dusting of flour to a work surface, and dump it out so you can kinda flatten it out with a rolling pin. Not flat flat, just to about an inch or so. Now quarter it and stack the quarters on top of one another. And flatten it again. We’re making layers!

Roll it out and divide into 150g pieces. If you’re fancy, use a cup or biscuit cutter to make 3 inch rings. Obviously mine are more lopsided triangle-y than anything, but you be as meticulous as you like. Makes about 13.

Put the biscuits on a parchment lined baking sheet. If the oven isn’t ready yet, just keep these cold until the oven is hot. Once the oven is ready, bake for 15 to 20 mins. But check at 15.

When you pull them out, there might be a bit of butter on the bottom of the pan. Don’t worry, you didn’t mess up! Wait for it to cool a bit before you dig in and enjoy all that flaky layered cheesy goodness.