Five Ingredient, 30 Minute Jalapeño Cheddar Biscuits

Biscuits are to me, what liquor is to a fresh 21-year-old –I know no limits, eat entirely too many and end up with a nasty biscuit-induced hangover afterwards.

I can’t help it. The buttery, flaky bites of heaven get me every.single.time. Given the difficult decision between a biscuit and a buttery roll, nine times out of ten, I’ll choose the biscuit. Simply irresistible.

My biscuit love affair began as a child when I tried frozen biscuits at a friend’s house for the first time – they were single-handedly one of the most delicious foods I’d ever tasted. They weren’t anything fancy or homemade, I mean, they were frozen after all, but they were everything a perfect biscuit should be – light as air, flaky, buttery and completely addictive all at the same time. Every day after school, we’d go to her house, giddily pull out the biscuits from the freezer, bake wayyyy too many, and then smother them with spreadable butter for the perfect and ever-so-healthy after school snack.

Since then I’ve consumed and baked biscuits of all varieties from buttermilk to cream; fluffy to crispy; light to dense; and I’ve come to the conclusion that there is just no such thing as a bad biscuit. There’s just not.

Hands down my favorite combination for a biscuit is an even proportion of butter (for flavor) to shortening (for lightness) and heavy cream (for obvious reasons) as the liquid. While of course, not the most waist-friendly, for me, this yields the absolute perfect biscuit.

If you stopped here and read the recipe, you’d immediately call me a hypocrite because this recipe calls for neither shortening nor heavy cream, BUT hear me out before you call my bluff. In this particular recipe, I wanted to make biscuit making as approachable and simple as possible by using as few ingredients as possible. Butter is the secret flavor weapon in all biscuits, so obviously that was something I couldn’t leave out. Whole milk instead of cream lighten the biscuits up just a touch (fat-wise) and shredded jalapeno cheddar cheese ads both flavor and an element of excitement to an otherwise mundane biscuit recipe.

In all my biscuit making endeavours, I’ve found two tips to yield the most delicious biscuits:

1. Keep all the ingredients cold. Keeping the ingredients cold (the butter, the milk, the cheese) ensures a super light flaky biscuit. What happens when biscuits cook is the little particles of butter melt and expand creating that light and flaky biscuit texture we all love. If the butter is too warm, that step won’t happen and you’ll be left with sad, flat biscuits — No bueno.

2. Work VERY quickly. The reasoning is basically the same as above, if you mess with the dough too much, the butter will consequently melt and the dough will become too tough to eat.

So here’s how I very simply made them: Flour, salt and baking powder are whisked together. Then the cheese and (frozen) butter is mixed in. Lastly, the milk is poured in. At this point, we want to work quickly. Stir the mixture just until everything is almost combined, and then dump it out onto a lightly floured surface. Gently knead the dough once or twice until it comes together and then gently pat it into a 1/2 inch thickness. These particular biscuits were miniature (for a recipe coming up!), so I used a 1/4 cup measure to cut the biscuits, but you can make them whatever size you want. For me, this made about 18 one inch biscuits.

Next up, they’re brushed with a little bit more whole milk, sprinkled with extra jalapeno cheddar cheese and popped into a 425 degree oven until they’re golden brown, risen and perfume your entire house.

Now THOSE are some biscuits, if I do say so myself… They’re perfect straight out of the oven slathered with butter, but stayed tuned to see what I do with them!