Whole Wheat Buttermilk Biscuits

I've been doing a lot of bread experiments lately and my most successful so far have been these whole wheat buttermilk biscuits. I didn't actually convert this recipe over from a white flour recipe (I'll explain more about that at a later date), I actually found it here on food.com.

For this recipe you'll need:
9 oz whole wheat flour (preferably from hard wheat)
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda (aluminum free)
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup + 2 tbsp buttermilk
6 tbsp unsalted butter, cold

I've found that it's a lot cheaper to buy organic wheat and mill my own flour. Aside from being cheaper, it is also more nutritious to mill wheat as needed. Freshly milled whole wheat flour does not have the same nutty flavor that whole wheat flour purchased at the store does. The nutty flavor is due to oxidation and rancidity setting in, not that the flour isn't any good.......it's just not fresh, but back to the recipe.

First weight 9 oz of hard wheat, in this case I'm using hard red wheat.

I mill my flour twice, I find that I get a much finer flour and it's A LOT quicker than trying to go from wheat berries to super fine flour (pastry) flour.

This is the first corse mill:

This is the second mill result:

See how light and airy that is? Which is why I weigh my ingredients because if I used a measuring cup there would be a variance which would mess up my biscuits but 9 oz is 9 oz regardless of the light and fluffy factor. Set aside 2 oz of the flour for later use.

Next add the other dry ingredients and cut up the butter into small cubes. With a fork mash the butter into the dry ingredients, if you have a food processor you could put everything in there and pulse until a crumble is achieved (I broke my food processor so I use a fork). 

Next pour in the butter milk and mix everything together. At this point the mixture is going to be very wet, sticky and look like a blob.  Turn the dough out on a floured surface.

At this point you need to sprinkle a lot of your reserved flour (the 2 oz that was set aside earlier) on the blob, then roll the blob around until a unsticky ball of dough forms. You might have to sprinkle and roll a few times before the ball of dough forms, just don't use all your reserve flour doing this. 

Next, pat the dough out into a rectangle. The thickness depends on your preferences, I like thick biscuits so I usually pat my dough out to be about 1/2 inch or so. 

Cut out your biscuits using a biscuit cutter, cookie cutter, a glass or whatever else works for you and place them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. This recipe is supposed to make 12 biscuits but I tend to make my biscuits a little larger than normal so I get about 8.5 or so. Once you've cut out as many biscuits and you can ball the dough back up and pat it out again. You might need to add a little more flour at this point as well. 

Bake at 450 for 10-12 minutes depending on your oven. I like to butter the tops when they come out the oven but I also LOVE butter.............your choice.