Flaky Sourdough Biscuits

As a native Southerner, I take biscuits very seriously- and these flaky Sourdough Biscuits do not disappoint! They’re tender, buttery, fluffy, and packed with layers, made using sourdough discard and buttermilk for an irresistible flavor.

One of the best things about homemade sourdough biscuits is their versatility. You can prepare them in advance by freezing the unbaked biscuits, making it easy to bake them fresh in the morning. Once out of the oven, slather them with butter, jam, honey, or pair them with rich biscuits and gravy.

In the recipe guide below, I’ll show you how to make the flakiest sourdough biscuits step by step. With detailed instructions, plenty of photos, and helpful tips, you’ll have everything you need to bake these classic Southern-style biscuits to perfection.

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👍 Why You’ll Love This Recipe

• Flaky, fluffy biscuits that rise tall.
• Can easily make them overnight or ahead of time.
• No fancy equipment is required.
• Slight tang from buttermilk and sourdough discard.
• Freeze extremely well.
• Excellent for savory or sweet toppings, such as jams, honey, gravy, or breakfast sandwiches.

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🔍 How to Get Flaky Sourdough Biscuits

Like making other homemade pastries such as Sourdough Pie Crust, Sourdough Croissants, or Sourdough Blueberry Scones, these tips will help you get flaky and tender biscuits every time.

• Keep your ingredients cold
  • Use frozen grated butter and cold ingredients to prevent gluten development. Unlike breads, we don’t want to develop gluten. That way, we’ll get a tender biscuit.
• Freeze the biscuits before baking
  • Colder biscuits will create more steam in the hot oven and help the flaky layers separate.
• Bake the biscuits close together
  • Like scones, biscuits benefit from being baked relatively close together. It forces them to rise tall like accordions.
• Fold or laminate the dough to create flaky layers
  • Laminating or folding the biscuit dough creates stacks of buttery layers. I walk through how to do this easy step in the recipe!
• Don’t overmix
  • Overmixing and kneading leads to gluten development. While the dough will start out as clumpy and crumbly, the folds will help bring the biscuit dough together.
• Bake at a high temperature
  • The blast of heat in the oven helps your biscuits rise tall and develop flaky layers by generating steam, which creates lift and separates the dough into distinct, airy layers.

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🛠 Tools Needed:

See below for my sourdough biscuit tool recommendations and substitutions.

• Baking scale
  • Ingredients like flour and sourdough starter weigh differently from person to person when measured by volume. For the best results, I recommend using a baking scale.
• Box Grater
  • Use a box grater to shred frozen butter into small, uniform pieces. This method ensures the butter distributes evenly throughout the dough, better than mixing by hand or using a pastry cutter. It also allows you to work more quickly, keeping the ingredients cold for flakier biscuits.
  • It can be a bit of an arm workout, so use a food processor if you need to.
• Bench Scraper
  • A bench scraper is a versatile tool for bringing the biscuit dough together, folding it to create layers, and cutting the biscuits. If you don’t have a bench scraper, a sharp knife works just as well for cutting the dough into clean shapes.
• Fork
  • No need for a whisk or spatula. You can toss the biscuit dough with a fork, evenly distributing the wet and dry ingredients.
• Rolling pin
  • Roll the dough into a rectangular slab each time before folding.
• Pastry brush
  • For brushing buttermilk on top, which helps the biscuits brown beautifully and adds a golden, glossy finish.

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🛒 Ingredients Needed:

See my ingredient recommendations, substitutions, and other sourdough biscuit variations below.

• Unsalted butter, frozen
  • Frozen, grated butter is ideal for sourdough biscuits because it keeps the ingredients very cold, ensures even distribution, and allows you to work quickly to avoid overmixing the dough.
  • Since these are buttery biscuits, I recommend using a high-quality butter that has great flavor, such as Cabot, Kerrygold, or Plugra.
• All-purpose flour
  • It’s common to make southern-style biscuits with a soft wheat flour such as White Lily. However, it’s not available everywhere, so I developed and tested this recipe with King Arthur all-purpose flour.
• Granulated sugar
  • The recipe includes just a couple of teaspoons of sugar, but it plays an important role. Sugar helps tenderize the biscuits and adds a subtle hint of sweetness, complementing their otherwise savory flavor.
  • Leave out the sugar if you want. I wouldn’t recommend using honey or maple syrup as it may make the dough too wet and difficult to work with.
• Baking powder & baking soda
  • The two mechanical leaveners help the biscuits rise tall and stay fluffy. I use both as baking soda interacts with the acid in the buttermilk and sourdough discard.
• Salt
• Buttermilk
  • Almost all southern-style biscuits are made with buttermilk, which contributes to the tangy flavor, fluffy texture, and rise of the biscuits.
  • Liquid buttermilk works best, but you can substitute it with reconstituted dried buttermilk. Alternatively, you can use whole milk with a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar for a similar acidity.
• Sourdough discard (or active starter)
  • Sourdough discard is unfed sourdough starter that you can use in sourdough discard recipes. When I feed my starter, I store the discard in the refrigerator so there’s no waste. Learn how to make sourdough starter from scratch and my top sourdough starter tips.

Sourdough Biscuit Variations

• Whole wheat sourdough biscuits: Add ½ cup or about 60g of whole wheat flour for heartier biscuits. Gradually increase the amount of whole wheat flour if you want more, as you may need to adjust the amount of buttermilk you use.
• Cheesy Red Lobster biscuits: Use my Sourdough Biscuits with Cheddar and Chives recipe!
• Sourdough Sweet Potato Biscuits use mashed sweet potatoes for a more earthy biscuit.
• Blueberry Sourdough Biscuits: similar to making Sourdough Discard Blueberry Scones, fold in 1 cup of frozen blueberries into the biscuit dough.

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👨‍🍳 How to Make Flaky Sourdough Biscuits

Follow this visual recipe guide as you make these easy sourdough discard biscuits and learn how to make them ahead of time or overnight.

1. Grate the Frozen Butter

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

Grate two sticks of unsalted butter using a box grater onto a plate and chill until ready to mix into your dough.

Alternatively, you can use a food processor with the grater or shredder plate.

2. Mix the Dry Ingredients

In a large mixing bowl, combine the all-purpose flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda with a fork.

3. Mix the Buttermilk and Sourdough Discard

Mix the cold buttermilk and sourdough discard (or active sourdough starter) with the same fork in a liquid measuring cup or small mixing bowl.

Break apart any pockets of sourdough so the wet mixture is clump-free.

4. Mix the Sourdough Biscuit Dough

This process of mixing the biscuit dough is hands-off, using just a fork to toss the ingredients together. Using a fork instead of your hands ensures that the mixture doesn’t get too warm or overmix, and that the ingredients are only brought together into a shaggy dough.

Now, add the plate of grated butter to the bowl of dry ingredients and toss together with a fork.

Create a small well in the center and pour in half of the wet ingredients. Pouring in half of the buttermilk ensures you don’t overmix the shaggy dough and helps distribute the wet ingredients better.

Toss with a fork. Clumps of biscuit dough will start to form. Then, drizzle in the remaining half of the wet ingredients and continue tossing until you have many clumps of shaggy biscuit dough with a few dry pockets remaining.

5. Fold and Cut the Biscuits

For the flakiest sourdough biscuits, fold or laminate the biscuit dough to create many stacks of buttery layers. It’s a similar process to making rough puff pastry like for my Sourdough Pop Tarts or extra flaky Sourdough Pie Crust. Furthermore, the folding will bring the shaggy biscuit dough together without kneading or overmixing.

To laminate biscuits, dump the shaggy dough onto a clean work surface. There will be dry, floury spots still. That’s okay! (Image 1 in the collage below).

Use a bench scraper and hands to pat the dough together into a rectangular slab (image 2).

Then, slide the bench scraper underneath one half of the slab and fold it down upon itself like a letter (image 3).

Rotate the dough 90º, lightly flour the top, and use a rolling pin to gently roll it out into a rectangular slab again. Repeat this folding, rotating, and rolling out process four more times (a total of five folds).

As a result, the dough will become more and more cohesive and create more stacks of flaky layers. Lightly flour the work surface, top of the dough, and your rolling pin as needed to prevent sticking.

After the final fold, roll the dough out into a 1-inch tall rectangle (usually around 7 ½”x6″ if you want to be precise with a ruler). Try to keep the edges and corners as square as possible.

Then, use the bench scraper or a sharp knife to trim the sides so they’re square, and slice the dough into thirds in each direction so you have 9 biscuits (image 4).

You can always use a round biscuit cutter if you prefer, but the rolled-out scraps are never as good and less flaky. If you do use a biscuit cutter, flour the bottom lightly and press straight down without twisting so you don’t seal the layers of butter.

6. Chill and Bake

Place the biscuits relatively close together onto the prepared baking sheet with about an inch of space between each other. Close spacing helps the biscuits support each other as they rise in the oven.

Freeze the baking sheet as you preheat the oven for at least 15 minutes (see overnight and make ahead options in step above).

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400ºF (204ºC) with an oven rack in the middle.

Once the oven is thoroughly preheated, use a pastry brush to paint the tops of the biscuits with a light coating of buttermilk. As a result, the sugars in the buttermilk will caramelize in the oven, giving you golden brown tops. Add a sprinkle of flaky salt or sugar on top if you like.

Bake for 22-25 minutes or until the biscuits are golden brown on the tops and bottoms.

Finally, let the biscuits cool slightly on a wire rack for 5-10 minutes before cutting in half and adding your favorite toppings!

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How to Store

Like all southern-style biscuits, sourdough discard biscuits are best served warm and eaten the day they’re made.

You can always make a small batch of biscuits and freeze the unbaked ones if you need to so you have the freshest biscuits on demand.

To store baked sourdough biscuits, keep them in an airtight container at room temperature for 2-3 days. Reheat in a toaster oven or the oven until warmed through.

You can store baked biscuits in the refrigerator for 5 days, but I find that they get a little soggy faster.

I don’t recommend freezing baked biscuits, but they’re excellent to freeze before baking and can be stored in a freezer-safe bag for three months. When baking from frozen, they may need an additional minute or two in the oven.

How to Serve

I love how versatile biscuits are for serving! They can be offered with sweet or savory toppings, as a side dish, or as a quick breakfast or brunch. Cut them open with a fork like Sourdough English Muffins to preserve their layers!

My go-to for serving biscuits is with a little salted butter and fruit jam or jelly, such as my Concord Grape Jam with Vanilla or this luscious Apple Butter. Since the biscuits are buttery, the acidity and brightness of fruit jam help balance out the tanginess and saltiness, creating an excellent contrast of flavors.

Drizzle honey on your biscuits if you prefer a sweeter treat, or add a dollop of honey butter, maple butter, or cinnamon butter for extra flavor. Cream cheese or clotted cream are also delicious.

As a southern staple, these sourdough biscuits are excellent served with biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast. Furthermore, they are also popular sides for recipes like shrimp and grits and BBQ or as breakfast sandwiches with eggs and bacon.

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❓ FAQs:

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Other Sourdough Breakfast Recipes You May Enjoy:

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