The Biscuit Recipe That Took Joanna Gaines A Year To Fully Perfect

When it comes to Southern cooking, one of the most beloved starches chefs opt to fix for breakfast is the humble biscuit. Warm, fluffy, and flaky at the edges — nothing can satisfy quite like a warm tray of these babies doused in butter and your favorite fruit spread. While there are many recipes out there, some have been truly worked at and perfected more than others. For one example, let's look at TV personality Joanna Gaines' recipe for biscuits, which took her a full year to refine.

According to Gaines' 2018 cookbook, "Magnolia Table," perfecting biscuits was an important goal for her as a chef. Apparently, Gaines was so determined to get these just right that she spent every Saturday for a year making biscuits, utilizing her family as taste testers. Every week, Gaines would tweak the recipe per their suggestions and try again using unconventional ingredients and methods of baking. Finally, one combination stuck out above the rest. 

What made this batch a winner? For one, Gaines opted to use eggs in this recipe, which many recipes don't call for. And two, she baked her biscuits in one small tray with the biscuits touching one another. So while this dish took her time to perfect, Gaines eventually found that those simple switches really elevated her recipe. 

While adding a simple ingredient and baking on a smaller tray may seem like simple changes, they were the keys to helping Joanna Gaines perfect her biscuit recipe. But how did these easy switches help form a better biscuit?

Eggs are typically not a part of many biscuit recipes because they can take away from the starch's signature flakiness. This can lead to a biscuit that's too thick and cakey. For Gaines, however, this element ended up adding just the right amount of fluff. The reason she had better luck with using eggs in her recipe was she used self-rising flour in lieu of all-purpose, which may have helped bring some definition to the treat.

Eggs aside, Gaines also chose to bake her biscuits on one small tray, making sure they all touched. While this might be a no-no for some bakers, for Gaines, this contributed to each biscuit's moisture. That is because biscuits have an easier time rising if they are able to stick together and support one another while baking.

While Joanna Gaines used some unconventional methods to make her biscuit recipe stand apart, some classic ingredients just shouldn't be messed with, and she kept that in mind too. One common ingredient she used in her biscuit recipe was buttermilk. Most chefs opt to use buttermilk because it helps keep biscuits soft, while other milks lack creaminess and can lead to a harder biscuit.

Another common tip she followed was to use cold cubes of butter in lieu of melted or room-temperature butter. Some of the best buttermilk biscuits use ice-cold butter because the stark difference in temperature helps create distinct flaky layers in the biscuits, which make for interesting textures. (So putting your butter in the freezer before you start cooking is a good idea.) The baking soda in her recipe also helps in this process of making a biscuit fluffy, as it introduces carbon dioxide into the dough, which helps it rise.

With this little bit of old kitchen knowledge and her own new techniques, Gaines was able to perfect her biscuits. Now, we just have to try them for ourselves.