The secret to sky-high biscuits? Treat them like croissants

Biscuits can take a beating. They get shoved into paper fast-food bags, drowned in sausage gravy and yanked from refrigerated tubes with a jarring pop. They’re the workhorses of the American table — dependable, durable, built for grab-and-go breakfasts and those messy, wonderful Sunday suppers. But what if we treated them with a little more care? Not in a fussy, croquembouche kind of way — just enough to give them the structural ambition they deserve. What if, instead of slapping them together and hoping for the best, we thought of them a bit more like croissants?

Now, the biscuits I grew up with were sturdy creatures. There were the buttery drop biscuits my mom made to accompany turkey and mashed potatoes on Sunday afternoons, the thin, almost defiant frozen biscuits my grandmother baked to pair with steak and gravy for holidays and the hand-rolled, slightly salty buttermilk biscuits from Cracker Barrel, a road trip staple on our annual 13-hour slog from Kentucky to South Carolina. All of them built to hold up under the weight of hearty meals, never delicate enough to be anything more than dependable.

But then in 2020 I saw Kelly Fields’ “The Good Book of Southern Baking,” and I did a double take. There, on the cover, was a biscuit unlike any I’d ever made — perched on a cake stand like it knew it belonged there, golden and proud, its layers stacked as neatly as books on a library shelf. I wanted that biscuit. I wanted one that shattered at the edges and peeled apart in crisp, buttery sheets. One that was airy, but could still hold a runny egg without going limp. 

And to get there, like in all pastry, Fields taught me that it all starts with ingredients.

Fields writes, “After seventeen years of professional baking and being surrounded by crazy-talented folks like former Willa Jean baker Mike Carmody (one of the most talented bakers I’ve ever worked with, whose influence and passion have made me a better cook and person), I learned that Italian-style 00 flour gives biscuits the strength they need without the chew.” It’s the kind of flour typically used for pizza and pasta, but in biscuits, it creates the perfect balance. 

The 00 flour absorbs the butter and buttermilk just right, giving the biscuit delicate, flaky layers without the chew that can sometimes weigh them down.

Then there’s the butter, which must be cold — truly cold. “The New Cooking School Cookbook” says it best: “When pressed with your finger, the butter should be cold and unyielding.” Chilled butter creates little pockets of fat in the dough that melt during baking, leaving behind flaky layers instead of a greasy mass.

Once the dough is ready, Fields has one more temperature trick: freeze the biscuits before baking. “The colder they are, the higher they rise,” she wrote. 

Freezing the dough solidifies the butter and ensures that it melts evenly during baking, leading to biscuits that rise higher and more evenly, with a texture that’s light yet sturdy. “You know what they say,” Fields continued. “The higher the hair, the closer to God.” 

Speaking of layers, lamination is the secret weapon of high-end pastry and it’s the technique worth borrowing for biscuits. 

The process of folding dough over butter to create multiple layers is nothing short of magic. As you fold and chill, the butter firms up, creating thin pockets between layers of dough. When the biscuits bake, the water in the butter turns to steam, puffing up the dough to form delicate, crisp layers. Each fold introduces more layers, which means more pockets for the steam to lift and more structure to the finished product. Lamination isn’t just about precision, though — it’s about being gentle. The process requires patience and care, and you want to treat the dough as tenderly as possible. The butter needs to stay cold, and the dough shouldn’t be overworked. A heavy hand will ruin what could be a crisp, flaky texture. It’s not fussy, but it’s delicate.

Ronni Lundy, one of the godmothers of contemporary Appalachian cuisine, writes about this in her 2016 cookbook “Victuals.” 

“The important thing to remember with biscuits is to use ‘light hands,’” she writes. “I am in favor of using fingers to blend the flour, fat, and liquid, and learning a feel for the dough by making them often — because depending on your flour, the humidity, maybe even the phase of the moon, you may need a little extra of one of the ingredients.”

“But don’t stress too much,” she adds. These are still biscuits, after all. 

I started with Fields’ two- to three-turn lamination, the classic biscuit method that’s a good balance of effort and reward. It worked. They were crisp-edged and flaky. But I kept wondering: Could I do more? Could I push the boundaries of a biscuit, make it even more ambitious? So I did. I added a fourth turn. And then a fifth. Each time, I was surprised by how much the texture improved — the layers became more distinct, the biscuit more confident in its structure. Six turns was the sweet spot. Perfectly towering, golden and impossibly layered — each sheet of butter and dough separating just enough to create something with both the rustic satisfaction of a classic biscuit and the precision of a finely made pastry.

But seven? Seven turns was structurally unsound. The biscuit began to buckle under the weight of its own layers, the folds getting too heavy, too thin. It collapsed under its own ambition, a reminder that even biscuits have their limits.

The result of all this care is a biscuit that doesn’t just sit on the plate but demands to be eaten. Crisp-edged, butter-rich, impossibly layered. It still has all the joy of a classic biscuit. The heartiness, the ease, the adaptability — but with a precision that makes it feel just a little bit extravagant. It’s a biscuit that believes in itself. 

And if that means putting in a little extra effort, well — biscuits deserve it.