I haven’t met a biscuit I didn’t like, but these Butter Swim Biscuits from Erika Council were love at first bite.
The recipe comes from Council’s “Still We Rise,” subtitled “A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit,” which is one of my favorite topics for a cookbook to come out … possibly ever.
Get the recipe: Butter Swim Biscuits
The Butter Swim Biscuits immediately caught my eye for a number of reasons, first and foremost their appearance. Look how lofty, fluffy and golden they are! They also don’t require cutting cold butter into flour, which can be more time-consuming and stressful than you want while you’re still rubbing the sleep out of your eyes. And the speed with which these biscuits come together and get onto the table — just a smidgen more than half an hour — means they are exactly the kind of thing you can whip up after rolling out of bed and then sit down and savor while you sip a hot beverage.
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End of carousel“Butter swims are close to my favorite way to bake biscuits,” writes Council, the proprietor of Atlanta’s Bomb Biscuit Co. and granddaughter of soul food chef Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, who ran a legendary restaurant in Chapel Hill, N.C. “Call it buttery bliss in a baking dish.”
The dough — so wet you could really call it a batter — gets spread over hot butter melted in a 450-degree oven, which results in the delightful contrast of the tender biscuit interior and crisp, practically fried edges that are reminiscent of the border of focaccia. Taste-wise, I was immediately struck by the leap my mind took to Popeyes and the Roy Rogers of my youth. And, yes, that’s a good thing.
The unique process extends to how the dough is cut, directly in the pan, as opposed to on a floured counter. Your lines may fill back in as you score the soft dough into nine squares, but it’s fine to take another pass through to separate the dough a little more. Wiping your knife in between cuts makes this a bit easier. But don’t worry about keeping the squares distinct, as they’ll bake back into each other and just leave a grid of shallow indentations helping guide you when you cut the biscuits after baking.
The biscuits are indulgent, so I never felt the need to eat them with more butter. A swipe of jam or a drizzle of honey would make fine adornments, though most of the time I ate them as is to best appreciate their stunning simplicity.
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