Cream Cheese Buttermilk Gluten Free Biscuits

Since we’re cooking with a Southern theme lately, how about some biscuits to go with your Hoppin’ John and pork chops? We love our biscuits, but it can be difficult to achieve the same results with gluten free flour that your Granny did using wheat flour. The chemical make-up of the flours are different, so the chemical reactions that determine the results of your recipes are different. Don’t give up, though. There is hope for your biscuits. With practice and the right techniques, you can learn to do some amazing things with gluten free baking.  Just tie on an apron and bravely dive into this recipe for a start.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups King Arthur or Bob’s Red Mill Biscuit and Baking Mix
• 1 tsp. sea salt
• 1/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1/4 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. xanthan gum
• 6 tbsp. butter, diced and chilled
• 2 tbsp. butter, melted
• 4 oz. cream cheese, chilled
• 1 cup buttermilk, chilled

Directions:

1. Start preheating the oven to 400 degrees before doing anything else. You need your oven nice and hot and your dough nice and cold when you start to cook the biscuits. Cover a baking sheet with parchment and set it aside for when you need it.
2. Take a large mixing bowl, and mix all the dry ingredients together. Then cut in the chilled butter with a fork or a mixer on low. Beat in the cream cheese, gradually adding an ounce at a time as it blends in.
3. Slowly pour in the buttermilk while you mix until all of the dough is even and smooth. You should have a thick dough that holds it’s shape well enough to work with, not a wet, sticky, or runny dough. Some baking experts say you should let dough sit in the refrigerator at this point for about 30 minutes to 1 hour so that the ingredients can soak into one another. But, if you’re in a hurry you can skip that part.
4. Flour a sheet of wax paper and roll out the dough to around 1/2 inch thick square. Gently pick up the edge directly in front of you and fold the dough in half.  Pick up all of the dough, then rotate it a quarter of a turn to the right. Roll the dough back out like it was before. Repeat this folding and turning process three more times, four in total, so that all four sections of the dough have been folded. This may seem like a lot of trouble, but it creates a wonderful flaky texture in the biscuits.
5. Once the dough is again in a nice 1/2 inch thick square, cut out round pieces of dough with a biscuit cutter, cookie cutter, or even the top of an overturned juice glass if that is all you have. Put each piece of dough on the parchment as you cut it. Make a ball out of the random parts of dough left over and roll it back out to get as many biscuits out of the dough as you can.
6. Spoon or brush the melted butter over the tops of each biscuit, then refrigerate the dough for at least 15 minutes until firm.
7. Bake the biscuits at 400 degrees for around 15 minutes until golden brown. If you think your oven might not cook evenly, as most don’t, rotate the baking sheet about halfway through the cook time for even browning.

Adapted from http://www.yummly.com/recipe/external/Cream-Cheese-Buttermilk-Biscuits-678460

27 Dec This entry was published on December 27, 2014 at 9:28 pm. It’s filed under Recipes and tagged Food, Recipes. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.