Boost Your Breakfast Game with These Blueberry Biscuits

Preparation

Center a rack in the oven and preheat it to 425 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a baking mat.

Stir the yogurt and milk or buttermilk together in a bowl.

Put the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl and whisk to combine. Push the flour mixture to the side, so you’ve got a little work space in the bowl, and pour the sugar into the space. Top with the lemon zest and, using your fingers, work in the zest until the sugar is moist and fragrant. Then stir everything together.

Scatter the butter pieces over the dry ingredients, toss so that they’re coated with flour and then, using your hands, press, mash, and rub the ingredients together into you have a bowl full of pieces as small as flakes and as large as peas. Pour the yogurt-milk mixture into the bowl and, using a fork, roughly mix the ingredients together. Stir in the blueberries. The dough will be dry, so you’ll need to toss it with the fork, squeeze it a few times with your fingers and knead it a couple of times with your hands to bring it together. Some berries will bruise and break, but that’s fine.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and pat it out ½ inch thick into a circle, a square, a rectangle or a raggedy whatever-shape-it-wants-to-be. Cut out as many biscuits as you can using a 2- to 2 ½-inch biscuit cutter (or cut other shapes)—cut the biscuits close to one another, so you get as many as possible out of this round—and place them a couple of inches apart on the baking sheet. Gently pat the scraps together and cut out as many more biscuits as possible. The biscuits made with scraps will still be delicious, but they won’t rise as high as the others. (At this point, the biscuits can be frozen for up to 2 months; see note.) Sprinkle the tops lightly with sugar.

Bake the biscuits for about 15 minutes, until they’re tall and golden. Pile them into a basket and serve while they’re hot. Or, if you’d like to shortcake them, let them rest on a rack until they are just warm or at room temperature.

STORING: Biscuits are best served soon after they’re baked and best on the day that they’re made. If you must hold them overnight, cover, keep at room temperature and then rewarm them in a 350-degree-F oven or split and toast before serving.

WORKING AHEAD: The dough can be made, cut and frozen up to 2 months ahead—make sure to wrap the rounds airtight—and then baked straight from the freezer. As soon as you start to preheat the oven, place the biscuit pucks on a lined baking sheet and let them stand until the oven reaches temperature. You may need to bake them a few minutes longer.

Excerpted from Baking With Dorie: Sweet, Salty, & Simple © 2021 by Dorie Greenspan. Photography © 2021 by Mark Weinberg. Reproduced by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.