This Is The Must-Have Flour For Perfectly Soft, Buttery Biscuits

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Nothing beats a soft, warm, buttery biscuit to go along with your breakfast (or dinner). But what's the secret to making your homemade biscuits taste like they came straight from a restaurant? The flour you select can be a big factor. And our recommendation comes straight from the biscuit king himself: Melvin Boots Johnson, chef and owner of Harlem Biscuit Company and Boots & Bones Steakhouse.

We recently sat down with Johnson at the 2025 New York City Wine & Food Festival to discuss how he gets soft, flaky biscuits every time. He shared that White Lilly Enriched Self-Rising Flour is his flour of choice. Unlike all-purpose flour brands, White Lily uses soft red winter wheat to make each bag, giving it a lower protein and gluten content that gives your biscuits that melt-in-your-mouth quality. Johnson explained that the self-rising version is generally a great pick "because you don't have to measure the baking powder or salt and [add] stuff to it" since it already contains both leavening and salt. If you opt for self-rising flour, you'll really only need just three ingredients to make light and fluffy biscuits: butter, buttermilk, and, of course, the flour itself.

Making perfectly soft biscuits is about more than what you put in your bowl. It's also about how you work with the ingredients in it, raising a crucial question: stand mixing or hand mixing? For Johnson, it's hand mixing all the way.

The reasons are both practical and sentimental. On the practical side, a stand mixer has the potential to ruin your biscuit dough. Making biscuits is a delicate art, and introducing a stand mixer makes it more than likely that you'll over-mix your dough, leaving a gummy or chewy biscuit in its wake. Luckily, Johnson presents an alternative: using your hands.

"We do everything by hand," he shares. But for Johnson, hand mixing isn't just a technique but a tradition. "I cook like a 70-year-old Black woman. You know, we didn't have a whole lot of stand mixers and stuff back then. Grandmothers, they did everything by hand."

The result? Not only a biscuit dough that isn't overworked, but one that contains another special ingredient: love. Johnson explains that "doing it by hand" allows you to really "feel the love in your food." So once you add a scoop of White Lily Self-Rising Enriched Flour into your bowl, throw some love in there too, and mix your dough by hand. It just might be the other ingredient your biscuits have been missing.