Before we get too far into this, I’m going to come right out and say it. I’m a bad southerner.

Despite spending my entire childhood living in either Alabama or Mississippi, there are lots of southern rites of passage I’ve never done. I don’t know if it’s because I was raised in the suburbs, or my parents’ working situation at that time, but there are quite a few things I just didn’t do growing up that are Southern (with a capital S) staples.

For example, I grew up going fishing with my dad and my grandfather, but I never went hunting as a kid. None of my relatives did, so I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s something I would never want to do. Recently, my father-in-law has been doing his best to introduce me to the sport. Last week, he took my husband and I out to a gun range to get in some shooting practice. And let me say, I can see why it becomes addictive.

So, please don’t take it as any form of snobbery or slight when I write what’s coming next. And please don’t think my love for southern food is lackluster because I’m uninitiated. But until this week, I’d never made homemade biscuits before.

I can already hear all of the Golden Triangle asking who raised me, and how I ended up not knowing how to make biscuits at 25 years old. It’s not that I grew up without biscuits. I LOVED biscuits growing up, particularly when my dad made gravy to go with them on Sunday mornings. Once a week, our breakfast table was piled high with every delicious food you can think of, including some delicious, buttery biscuits. They were just from the freezer.

But over the past few years, the company that made those biscuits started changing up their recipe, and even made a “thin” version of the biscuits I knew and loved. Between that insult and my husband’s general lack of enthusiasm for breakfast, biscuits haven’t been a big part of our diet lately. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t dreaming about them, though.

Earlier this week, I was thinking about my family’s annual Christmas brunch, and what I was going to bring to it next month, when the phantom taste of biscuits and gravy seemed to appear on my tongue. I reached out to my dad and asked if he would be willing to make his sausage gravy again, and he heartily agreed. But over the past few years, I’ve been making bread pretty successfully. So I challenged myself to learn to make biscuits before Christmas.

Well, that was the timeline I had planned. But after a phone call with my mother on Monday, where I learned that my great-grandmother used to make homemade biscuits twice a day, every day for everyone on their cow farm in Georgia to eat, I became even more determined. Biscuits were in my blood, even if I’d never made them on my own.

Fueled by southern women of the past and a passion for carbohydrates, I found a recipe online from Sugar Spun Run and I went to work. I assumed that it would take me a couple of tries to get the technique down, but I was determined. No matter how long it took. No matter how difficult the journey. I would make delicious, fluffy, golden–

Oh, wait. The first batch came out great. The recipe I found was so easy to follow that I immediately had delicious biscuits on hand. I wasn’t expecting that, honestly.

Now, of course they’re not perfect. I plan to tweak and adjust my technique over time. But I also plan to never eat biscuits from the freezer again, if I can help it. I hope y’all will forgive me now. Oh, and enjoy a hot plate of fresh biscuits with me.

HOMEMADE BISCUITS

(Adapted from Sugar Spun Run)
Makes 6 biscuits

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons unsalted butter (very cold)
3/4 cup whole milk (buttermilk should work too, but I used whole)
Salted butter (for brushing over hot biscuits)

Directions:
■ Chill butter in freezer for 10-20 minutes before starting this recipe. Butter should be very cold to help biscuits become light and flaky.
■ Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
■ Combine flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Mix well.
■ Use a box grater to shred butter into small pieces. If they do not become small enough, continue to cut them down further until they become crumb-sized. Then add to flour mixture and stir, until the whole mixture looks like coarse crumbs.
■ Add milk. Use a wooden spoon or spatula to stir until just combined, being careful to not overwork the dough.
■ Transfer dough to a well-floured surface. Use your hands to gently work the dough together, adding flour if the dough is too sticky to manage.
■ Once the dough is cohesive, fold it in half over itself, using your hands to gently flatten the layers together. Rotate the dough 90 degrees, and then fold in half and gently flattening again. Do this step 5-6 times, still being careful to not overwork the dough. (You’re folding, not kneading.)
■ Use your hands to flatten dough to about 1 inch thick. Lightly dust a biscuit cutter or another similarly sized round cutter with flour. Then, press the cutter straight down into your dough and drop the biscuit onto your prepared baking sheet.
■ Repeat until you have gotten six biscuits out of the dough. You may need to gently rework it and recombine the dough to get six circles out of it.
■ Bake for 12 minutes, or until the tops of the biscuits are beginning to turn lightly golden brown. (My biscuits were a little large, so they took about 17 minutes.)
■ Brush tops of biscuits with melted salted butter immediately after removing them from the oven. Serve warm and enjoy.