It takes some moxie to move to the South and then a couple of years later start telling people how to make southern biscuits. But then who's going to come over and blog this for me, Paula Deen? I'm going for it.

Recipes for buttermilk biscuits, the archetypal chemically-leavened foodstuff, can be found everywhere. There are a million of 'em. I have my own personal favorites for various purposes (for dinner, for breakfast, in strawberry shortcake, you get me), but below is a very solid, standard recipe. This post, however, is more about technique, since it's my opinion that technique (more than any combination of ingredients) is what is responsible for producing the lightest, best-textured biscuit. What follows can be applied to just about any buttermilk or cream biscuit recipe.

Fundamentally, the process is about preventing the formation of gluten. Thus you want to handle the dough as little as humanly possible, and come hell or high water, avoid anything that resembles kneading. "Patting" is the order of the day where biscuits are concerned. Personally I find that a 50-50 mix of all-purpose flour and cake flour (essentially pastry flour) produces the best combination of light texture and crispy exterior, but that may just be me.

Leaving all your dairy ingredients in the fridge (biscuits are one of the few baking preparations where that's preferable), start by sifting all your dry ingredients (flours, salt, baking powder, and sugar if you're a northern nancy like me) into a bowl:

Dump in your chilled butter and/or lard pieces, already cut into small bits...

...and using only the tips of your fingers, "pinch" the butter into the flour until it's mostly even with a few lumps.

Now the delicate part. Pour in your buttermilk (which should be cold so as to prevent the butter from softening or melting), and with a spatula start incorporating it.

After about 30 seconds of turning the bowl while you flip (this is essentially folding), the flour should be completely moistened, about like so.

Now, using your hand — but without kneading — collect the dough together in a rough ball.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and pat it down into a layer about half an inch thick.

Next: cut. Here you want to be careful to push straight down and through the dough without twisting. Biscuits, though they are chemically leavened, nevertheless rely on butter layers for a good deal of their lift. You don't want to mess those up. If the dough is a little crumbly that's no big deal.

Lay them out on a sheet pan and bake on a high shelf in the oven at 500. The whole process including baking should take you about twenty minutes. Budda-bing, budda-bang, budda-boom, that's biscuits the way God intended them (if by God you mean a little old southern lady named Minnie). Serve hot with red pepper jelly.

UPDATE: A terrific tip from Sue in Texas

I am enjoying your blog immensely! I am from Texas and was curious about your method for biscuits...you have it down perfectly. The last thing I do before they go into the oven (and no self-respecting true southern biscuit baker would leave this out...) melt 1-2 tablespoons of (salted) butter (fresher, the better) in your pan (in the oven, of course) while you finish cutting out your biscuits. As soon as the butter has melted and warmed--not hot--take your pan out of the oven, set each biscuit in the melted butter, then turn over and put it in its appointed place. The butter creates a nice, golden and crispy crust on both sides....YUMMMM! uumm...I have to go make biscuits now...

Forget about Harley vs. Kawasaki, Beatles vs. Rolling Stones, mulching vs. bagging...if you want to witness a true breakdown of civilized discourse, try asking a group of octogenarian bakers what kind of fat makes the best pie crust or biscuit. Butter or shortening? Or maybe lard? Here in the South that subject is dinner party taboo.

Why the big flap? Well it all depends on where your allegiances lie in the whole flavor-vs.-texture debate. If a tender texture is what's important to you, then you're probably a shortening advocate. If flavor is what really rocks your world, then you're a butter person. For you can't have both perfect flavor and perfect texture in a pie crust or biscuit, and the reason comes down to some important differences between butter and shortening.

What is that difference? Primarily moisture. About 17% of butter is water. Compare that to shortening which contains no water. And that makes a big difference in a dough. For as I mentioned earlier in the week, water goes hand-in-hand with gluten. The more you have in your dough, the more likely you'll be to inadvertently create active gluten. Even if you go to extremes to avoid working a dough, where moisture is present, those long spindly molecules find a way to hold hands. And that means toughness.

A pie crust made with all shortening is an incredibly tender affair. Especially when made with a Southern-style soft wheat flour, it can be so delicate it barely holds its shape (the fact that the very outer layer of the crust essentially "fries" in the oven heat also gives shortening crusts a somewhat "crispy" edge). The trouble is flavor. Shortening is extremely bland (plus it has that characteristic tongue-coating mouthfeel). Butter by comparison is loaded with rich flavor. It browns a crust nicely due to the proteins is contains, and its just-below-body-temperature melt point means no greasy feeling on the tongue. It also tends to create a flakier crust since its moisture turns to steam in the oven, creating a small rise that helps preserve the butter-layers.

Of course more than a few people attempt to split the difference. There are very few home bakers out there that employ an all-shortening pie crust (though there are plenty of people that make all-shortening biscuits). Still there's very little agreement as to how much is enough, or for that matter too much.

The third-party spoilers in this partisan debate are the lard-crust advocates, who argue that lard is the best of all possible worlds. Like shortening it's all fat and so gives thirsty gluten molecules no help. Like butter it has a low melt point (providing a non-greasy mouthfeel). It browns fairly well and is loaded with flavor, granted it's a porky kind of flavor, but the people who love it swear by it.

So, I guess it's a pick-your-poison kind of dealie (though actually all these fats are about the same in terms of their "health value"). The general rule of thumb when considering a fat for your Biscuit Method bakery: shortening (or lard) = tender, crispy and denser, butter = flaky, flavorful and lighter. Choose your side. Or alternately join the search for the ultimate compromise. Should you find it, you should probably run for president.

The biscuit method is probably the simplest of all the Big Five mixing techniques. On first glance, it resembles Muffin Method in that the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients are mixed together separately before being combined. The key difference is that the fat, which is almost always a solid fat, is rubbed into the dry goods before the main mixing event begins.

What are the advantages to that? First, the "cutting in" of fat serves the function of coating and lubricating flour granules, which greatly reduces the ability of the gluten molecules they contain to bond to one another. Thus, the Biscuit Method makes baked goods tender. The other big thing the Biscuit Method does is make things flaky.

How's that? Well remember the rubbing thing. Most of the time when you dive into a recipe that employs the Biscuit Method, you'll come across instructions directing you to stop rubbing when the fat blobs are about the size of peas (or at the very least when the mixture starts to look "like corn meal"). The reason you do this is because flakiness is a direct result of odd-sized blobs of fat, which, when the dough is rolled out into a sheet, form semisolid layers. When the dough is baked these layers melt away, leaving long slender gaps in the structure. These gaps are what are responsible for the texture we know as "flaky".

Like the Muffin Method, the Biscuit Method is characterized by minimal mixing. Once the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients finally come together, the less you work the dough the better. This is especially important with pie crust, where any gluten formation at all can lead to significant shrinkage and toughness. Which makes me think I should make a pie this week too. Whaddya say?