Star Chef Alton Brown Talks Biscuits

Perhaps you consume your buttered biscuits sandwich-style, but I have always followed my Oreo MO, separating the lids from the bottoms, thus protracting the pleasure. I would start with the lids, my eyes rolling back in my head like a shark tucking into a harbor seal, before savoring the bottoms, always butterier thanks to gravity. The next day would offer even more exquisite pleasure, as Ma Mae would split the leftovers, butter them, park the halves on crumpled foil, and toast them, an operation that converted the staling pucks into something akin to tiny English muffins. Even now, fifty years later, I can remember looking forward to spending the night with my grandparents, because: biscuits.

When I became old enough, and interested enough, to start cooking for myself, one of the first things I attempted was Ma Mae’s biscuits. She was kind enough to share the recipe, which contained only four ingredients: flour, vegetable shortening, cultured buttermilk, salt. She was a little shaky on the amounts because she did everything by feel, and some days you might need a little more of this or less of that. She provided rudimentary instructions as well, but I’d been watching closely for years and figured I’d been “off book” since I was 10.

So, imagine my surprise when my first solo effort to reproduce her magic, in my college apartment, resulted in something akin to 17th-century ship biscuits: hard, flat and potentially impervious to weevils. Those twin, albeit contrary, characteristics, tender and flaky, had been replaced by chalky and rocky. Eating them required a long sop in soup. Clearly something had been lost in translation. When I broke down and made a long-distance call to consult with her on the matter, Ma Mae pointed out that I hadn’t been paying attention, or I would have known to buy self-rising flour. Oops.

As the years rolled by, I kept attempting to biscuit. Occasionally, the results were acceptable, some not so much, but none were Ma Mae’s. After finally finishing college, I worked for a few years, then quit my job and went to culinary school. There, I undertook copious biscuit research and discovered the functional differences between butter, shortening and lard. I investigated various flours and found that those ground finely from soft (low-protein) winter wheats did indeed make for a more tender product, confirming the logic behind Ma Mae’s use of White Lily, milled (at the time) in Knoxville, Tennessee, and famous for its low protein content of 9 percent rather than the 11 percent typical of most all-purpose flours. I wouldn’t go with the self-rising product because I wanted to control the leavening myself, balancing the use of both baking powder and baking soda to maximize the reaction with the buttermilk.

By 1999, I felt I had a sufficient grasp on biscuitology and so decided to include an episode on the subject in the first season of my Food Network show Good Eats, featuring a bake-off pitting Ma Mae’s witchcraft against my science. According to the crew, who consumed the results that day, witchcraft won, despite the fact I had studied her moves for years, hidden temperature probes in her oven, gone behind and weighed her mise en place to the gram, even bothering to purchase the exact same ingredients, from the exact same market as her. And yet, there was something I had failed to grok.

A couple of weeks following my defeat, I called Ma Mae and asked her to make biscuits for me just one more time. She told me I was crazy, but the next Saturday morning I arrived early and found her waiting for me. Determined to sit down, shut up and watch, I parked myself on a stool in a corner of the kitchen.

Ma Mae began any baking session by taking off her engagement and wedding rings (Papa Clyde had died a few years back) and setting them carefully in a porcelain ring holder she kept on the sill of the kitchen window. It was shaped like a shallow bowl with a vertical cone in the middle to stack rings up on. She had suffered with arthritis for as long as I could remember and removing the rings was a chore, and I felt a pang of guilt for causing this particular pain, familiar though it was.

I watched her spread the wax paper that she would always pat out her dough on, and sprinkle it with flour, saw her measure more flour into an old, plastic mixing bowl, then work in the shortening with a butter knife, pour on the buttermilk without any measuring at all, and spoon the sticky mix onto the wax paper. I’d seen all this a hundred times before.

But when she started kneading the dough, I saw something I’d overlooked and probably only noticed now because I’d been thinking about the rings and the pain they’d caused. When she kneaded the dough, she didn’t flex her fingers at all but kept them straight, her hands flipper-like. The resulting motion, gentle and rhythmic — folding, spreading, folding — continued until the dough was plump and smooth.

Out came the biscuit cutter, long liberated from its original wooden handle. The rounds were punched (straight down and then twist), and parked on a darkly patinaed sheet pan, lightly greased with Crisco. The center of each biscuit was then gently dimpled with two fingertips, a move she swore resulted in level tops.

She then slid the pan into the lower third of the oven, closed the door, doffed her apron, sat and asked me if I had learned anything new this time. I thought for a second and decided to say no. I told her I was giving up, and that if I wanted her biscuits in the future, I’d just have to visit her. She laughed and said that was fine by her.

The room filled with that toasty aroma, she removed the pan, swaddled the newly golden biscuits with a tea towel and stashed them in the old West Bend aluminum bun warmer, a device shaped like a lilliputian Weber kettle grill, sans legs. We let them cool slightly and soften in the steam of the warmer, then ate them with butter. Then I raked the front yard and cleaned out the back gutters. Fair trade.

Ma Mae died just a couple years after that visit. I miss her still, especially her sly sense of humor, but I don’t have to miss her biscuits. I inherited the West Bend aluminum bun warmer, and the biscuit cutter and the ring holder, which sits in my kitchen window, a reminder that when it comes to the important lessons in life, you sometimes have to see beyond the questions you know to ask.

Excerpted from FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Essays and Ruminations by Alton Brown. Copyright © 2025 by Alton Brown. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.