What Exactly Are Butter Dip Biscuits?

Butter makes everything better; this is one of the truisms of cooking. It may not be great for your health to have your food swimming in the stuff, but sometimes, you need that richness in your life. Happily, there are plenty of dishes out there that focus on butter first, butter second, and butter always. There's gooey butter cake, of course, and butter-poached lobster, and brown butter cookies. But the hits don't stop there.

One butter-based dish you might not have had, but that you really should try, are butter dip biscuits, also known as butter swim biscuits. You might be reading "butter swim" and thinking this is a butter-tacular dish, but ... actually, yeah, that's exactly what it is. They don't get that visible golden-brown hue by accident; they're baked while quite literally drenched in butter, resulting in a rich flavor to match their appearance. Paula Deen, eat your heart out.

Doubtless you're familiar with buttermilk biscuits, and you might be wondering how butter dip biscuits differ from them. Well ... they don't, not really. Butter dip biscuits typically are buttermilk biscuits — but from there, the butter gets dialed up to 12 (11 just isn't enough for this recipe). "Butter swim" is not some fanciful descriptor but a quite literal description of the dish itself. They are buttermilk biscuits that are swimming in butter.

Buttermilk biscuits are typically made on a baking sheet, but touching each other, to allow the biscuits to be satisfyingly pulled apart after baking. Butter dip biscuits, on the other hand, have to be made in some sort of baking dish with space at the top to spare. Why, you might ask? For the butter: they're literally topped with so much melted butter (along with another layer of butter along the bottom), right from the start of the baking process, that they're swimming in the stuff.

The end result of this butter extravaganza is pretty self-explanatory: you get biscuits so rich they might as well own a major tech company. The other great part of butter dip biscuits is that they're easy; you're just making buttermilk biscuits and adding more butter, and they cook in about 20 minutes. As such, they're not only delicious and rich but also a time saver.

As for where they came from, as far as anyone can tell, the first recipe appeared in a 1961 Betty Crocker cookbook. As such, they don't exactly have some hugely long history and very much feel like what they are: a 20th century invention. This isn't to say they're outdated, though; the thing about butter is it never really goes out of style. So if you're a fan of the rich taste of butter (and really, who isn't), give them a try some time and see for yourself.