The Unexpected Way Alton Brown's Grandmother Influenced His Biscuit Recipe

Family recipes that have been passed through generations are some of life's most precious gifts. The sentimental value of food and the power it has to bring people together is something that chef and author Alton Brown knows well. The Los Angeles-born television personality, whose parents hailed from Georgia, has built a career on the intersection of storytelling and food history and is deeply familiar with the human connection that Southern cooking, in particular, fosters.

One of the most quintessential Southern recipes is buttermilk biscuits. Found on almost every Southern dinner table, buttermilk biscuits are deceptively difficult to make properly, so it helps to have a tried-and-true family recipe to follow. Chef Brown speaks often about his grandmother, "Ma" Mae P. Skelton, and her proficiency in biscuit-making, and even had her on an episode of his Food Network show "Good Eats" to show him how to make biscuits. But, it seems that replicating his grandmother's buttermilk biscuit recipe still eluded Brown until after her passing. In an episode of "Biscuits & Jam," a podcast from Southern Living, Brown shared that, "I had gone for years not being able to conquer or replicate her [Ma Mae's] biscuits until I finally put ingredients out of my mind and technique out of my mind and noticed that, because she had arthritis, which was really bad in her later years, when she kneaded the biscuit dough she never bent her fingers. That was the secret. That was the entire difference between her biscuits and my biscuits is that I was overworking the dough by actually flexing my fingers into it."

It wouldn't be fair to talk about Brown and biscuits without getting into the science behind it all. Light, flaky, buttery biscuits don't just come together when you toss a little flour and buttermilk in a bowl. The reason Ma Mae's flat-handed technique for kneading her biscuits due to her arthritis resulted in such perfect biscuits was because of the way it encouraged and then preserved gluten formation in the dough. In simplest terms, it's easy to think of the gluten in doughs as the "glue" holding everything together. The proteins in flour get activated when mixed with water and gluten begins forming. Then the mixing and kneading process helps connect these activated gluten strands into a sort of woven chain. That woven chain of gluten is what gives breads and doughs their structure.

Properly developing these long chains of protein molecules and gluten is what gives biscuits their pillowy, fluffy, and dense but still light quality. The flat-handed technique used by Brown's grandmother helped make these gluten strands long without breaking them up by forcing curled fingers into the dough. The result is biscuits full of delicate, flaky layers.