The Ingredient Chef Boots Johnson Adds For Superior Buttermilk Biscuits

Buttermilk biscuits are truly a gift to the human race. The soft, delicious bread goes well with virtually everything, and as a biscuits and chocolate gravy devotee, it's unlikely you will ever change my mind on that. However, much like many great things in this world, buttermilk biscuits can always get better. That's why we went to an expert to see how to make the best biscuits we could ever dream of.

The expert we asked was none other than Chef Melvin "Boots" Johnson, a master of all things Southern cooking and beyond, who we got the chance to speak to during the New York City Wine & Food Festival last month. Chef Boots, who founded the Harlem Biscuit Company in NYC, gave us great insight into his special technique when making the most delicious buttermilk biscuits possible. 

"We sweeten our buttermilk," Chef Johnson explained, "Buttermilk has a little tang to it, so we put honey in there to mellow it out, and that's what makes our biscuits go crazy."

Anybody who has dined at the Harlem Biscuit Company will know there's something special about their buttermilk biscuits, and Boots agrees with that assessment. Beyond sweetening the buttermilk during the baking process, there are other, more subtle ways in which Boots makes the best buttermilk biscuits he can. According to him, It's all about prepping the dairy you use as well as you can. "It's pretty simple, freeze your butter," he said. "What we do is we grate the butter and we freeze it." For context, the reason you should be using frozen butter is that you want the butter you use in your biscuits to be as cold as possible in order to create a deliciously flaky biscuit. Baking is a bit of a science, but all you really need to know is that frozen butter behaves differently than melted butter (or room temperature, for that matter). 

Freezing your butter is vital to getting the most out of your buttermilk biscuit, but so is the aforementioned sweetening of the buttermilk itself. "The honey takes the bite out of the buttermilk," Boots elaborated, "It just sweetens it and adds to the flavor of biscuit." The Harlem Biscuit Company founder added that even if you don't use honey and instead decide to use something like sorghum (an ancient grain that can be turned into a sweet syrup) or molasses, sweetening the buttermilk is the oftentimes forgotten step to making even better buttermilk biscuits.