Never Fuss With Rounded Biscuits Again With This Alternative Method

Whether you love buttermilk fried chicken, shrimp and grits, pork-stewed collard greens, starchy black-eyed peas, towering banana cream pie, or cream cheese-frosted hummingbird cake, we think we can all agree: Southern cooking sure has a lot to offer the palate. The ingredients, cooking methods, and recipes typically associated with the American South can range from surprisingly simple to intimidatingly complex. Thankfully, one of the South's undisputed culinary stars belongs to the former category.

We're talking, here, about buttery, flaky, steamy biscuits. Typically a mix of all-purpose flour, plenty of chilled butter, and a touch of buttermilk for tanginess, biscuits accompany all manner of Southern fare — from fried catfish filets to salty country ham, but as far as we're concerned, they shine all on their own, with just a swipe of butter or a drizzle of honey.

While they have their particularities, biscuits aren't all that complicated to make at home, as long as you're working with cold butter and working quickly, according to Allrecipes. But one thing biscuits can be is messy, requiring a floured surface area, a rolling pin, and a cutter to stamp them out. This can result in a shabby kitchen, a tired baker, and a whole lot of dough scraps. 

Bake biscuits in a pan and cut them afterwards for quicker, less messy baking

Southern-style biscuits don't require much in the way of ingredients, but they do call for a measure of patience. Typical recipes for the Soul Food all-star require mixing a dough, patting or rolling it out onto a floured workspace, and cutting out individual biscuits with a mold or drinking glass. While it's a reliable process, on occasions where you're itching to accompany your fried chicken or sausage gravy with some biscuits and you just don't have it in you to go through all these steps, know that there's an easier way.

That way, according to America's Test Kitchen, is the "pat-in-the-pan" method. Just as it sounds, this approach entails mixing a standard biscuit dough, but then simply patting the dough into a greased baking dish — as opposed to the whole rolling-out shebang. You then score the biscuit dough into individual pieces, which you can cut with a knife once the biscuits are baked and cooled.

In addition to streamlining your biscuit-making endeavor, the method also produces less waste, according to the outlet. When you stamp out biscuits, you inevitably leave behind a little ring of dough, which shouldn't be reworked and patted out again, lest you develop chewy gluten in what should be a tender biscuit (via Lifehacker). With the pat-in-the-pan method, all that priceless dough goes right into the biscuits — and, soon enough, into your mouth.