Biscuits are always a guilty pleasure for me. Flaky or fluffy, light, and buttery, all words I would use to describe the perfect biscuit. Back in college, I was fortunate enough to go to school in Boston, where Sweet Cheeks Q is located. Sweet Cheeks is known for their iconic biscuit, which is the size of a human fist. The recipe for that was made public back in 2016, but being the baker that I am, I wanted to make a biscuit recipe that is truly my own. For this recipe, I feel like I have accomplished that. I used Horacio, my sourdough starter, to add an umami to the biscuit dough itself. Ever since I became a sourdough starter parent, I have been finding all kinds of usages for my starter. While a biscuit is a quick bread that is made with baking powder, as this recipe also is, I used the sourdough to add that savory sourdough tang. I also created a quick enriched buttermilk, using heavy cream and vinegar(lemon juice works here too!). Buttermilk can be made by mixing milk and an acid, but I used heavy cream namely because I ran out of milk, and I felt like the heavy cream adds a richness to the dough. Since I wanted this to be a distinctly savory biscuit, I also used black pepper, which when baked off and cooked with all of that dairy fat, has a mellowed out sharpness, giving the final biscuit an almost cacio e pepe-cheesy-ish flavor profile that pairs beautifully with pork(I might even make a sourdough biscuit Benedict with these because those would be extremely delicious).

With any butter-shortened dough recipe, temperature is key. This applies to pie crust, puff pastry, shortbread dough, and in this specific case, biscuit dough. You want the dough, while you are working with it, to stay cold, as that ensures that the butter stays intact prior to the baking process. The cold butter, as the dough bakes, puffs into steam, giving the final baked product that fluffiness indicative of a good biscuit. So my main recommendation here is finely dice then freeze your butter prior to measuring out everything else. That way, the butter will never get soft and melt into the dough. If the butter melts prematurely, your biscuits will be dense and greasy instead of light and fluffy. This is not a flaky biscuit dough, by the way, something that would be hard to achieve given the moisture content from the sourdough, but rather a fluffy, light, and pillowy biscuit. Speaking of sourdough starter, I made my starter months ago, so it has been thriving for a while. This recipe was designed specifically to use active sourdough starter discard, and since it does take at least 5 days to make an active starter, if you want a non-sourdough biscuit recipe, I do have this giant biscuit recipe you can totally use instead! The main difference here is that the sourdough starter does add a sour tang that plays off of the mild spice and smokiness of the black pepper in a similar vein to the iconic combination of lemon and pepper. All in all, these were delicious biscuits, and I am definitely considering making a biscuit benedict recipe with these in the future(the only thing stopping me is that the idea of eating these with Hollandaise, while it sounds tempting, that amount of butter also sounds like it will kill my arteries). But even then, the biscuits are tasty enough to be eaten on their own, or with butter or hot honey!

Makes 8 biscuits:
3.5oz heavy cream
1 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground black pepper
a pinch of salt
1 stick unsalted butter, diced and kept cold
2oz sourdough starter
1 egg
Maldon salt

In a cup, mix together your heavy cream and vinegar and allow them to sit at room temperature for 5-10 minutes. In a bowl, mix together your all-purpose flour, baking powder, ground black pepper, and salt. Mix through that the butter, allowing the butter to grind down with the flour into a fine, sandy texture. Create a well with the buttered flour and pour into that the heavy cream and sourdough starter. Mix everything together to form your dough. Refrigerate the dough for 1 hour. Then roll out the dough to 1/2-inch thickness. Cut the dough in half and stack the dough on top of itself. Re-roll the dough to 1/2-inch thickness again. Divide the dough into 8 cubes. Space the dough cubes to be at least 2 inches apart on a parchment-lined sheet tray. In a bowl, beat an egg until completely homogenous. Brush the tops of the dough cubes with egg and sprinkle Maldon salt on top of each cube as well. Bake the biscuit dough at 400 degrees F for 20 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking process to guarantee even baking.