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Pimiento Cheese Biscuits with Sweet & Spicy Butter Recipe courtesy of Ree Drummond Level: Intermediate Total: 1 hr 5 min (includes chilling time) Active: 40 min Yield: 9 biscuits
Ingredients
4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 teaspoons kosher salt 2 teaspoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 16 tablespoons frozen salted butter, grated 1 cup shredded sharp Cheddar 1 1/2 cups buttermilk 1/4 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese One 4-ounce jar chopped pimientos, drained and dried 2 tablespoons chipotles chopped very small 1 heaping tablespoon chopped fresh dill, plus more for garnish
Sweet & Spicy Butter: 1/2 cup (1 stick) salted butter, at room temperature 3 tablespoons honey 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Directions
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
In a large bowl, add the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, baking soda, frozen butter and 1/3 cup Cheddar. Cut the Cheddar and butter in with the flour until you have pea-sized pieces. To the flour mixture, add the buttermilk and fold until about halfway incorporated. Add the Monterey Jack, 1/3 cup Cheddar, and the pimientos, chipotles and dill. Fold until just combined.
Turn out the dough on a lightly floured work surface. Roll or pat the dough into a 1/2-inch-thick square. Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into four squares, then stack the squares on top of each other and roll or pat the dough into a 1/2-inch-thick square again. Repeat the cutting, stacking and rolling process twice more, but on the last stack, sprinkle the remaining 1/3 cup Cheddar between three of the squares and top the stack with the non-cheese square. Finish by rolling the dough into a 3/4-inch-thick square and cutting into 9 large squares; place on a baking sheet.
Chill the dough in the fridge for 15 minutes. Bake in the lower half of the oven until golden brown, 15 to 18 minutes.
For the sweet & spicy butter: Meanwhile, combine the softened butter, honey and cayenne pepper in a bowl with a fork until fluffy. Spread on the warm biscuits and garnish with dill.
Bread, it's not just a food, it's a way of life. We absolutely love bread around here so I thought
it'd be great for me to share some new favorites I've been making and I am going to start with
a good one, pimento cheese biscuits and I'm going to make a sweet and spicy butter to go with them.
They are amazing and so easy to throw together. I'm just making the flour mixture now,
started with some all-purpose flour and added baking powder and baking soda and then sugar
and salt, a couple of teaspoons of each and I'm using kosher salt but it works if you just want
to use regular iodized salt too. All right now of course the butter has to make a very big
appearance and I have a whole bunch of frozen butter that I grated. It's good to freeze the
butter really solid and then it's easy to grate and this will help it work into the dough a little
bit more easily and for the first addition of cheese I'm going to add a little bit of grated
sharp cheddar and then I'm going to break out my pastry blender and I'm just going to keep working
it together until the butter and cheese are totally mixed in with the flour. I am actually
heading to Bartlesville later today and I am going to give most of these biscuits to my dad. I'll drop
them off at his house for two reasons. First of all I got my love of bread from my dad and my love
of biscuits specifically. He loves treats like this and the other reason I'm dropping them off
with my dad is so I will get them out of my house because they are so delicious I can't resist them.
I mean they would not last the day, they would not last the daylight if I kept them here. Basically
you want to keep working the mixture until you don't see any big gobs of butter or cheese for
that matter and I think we are looking good. So I'll keep moving on. I'm going to add some
buttermilk which I think makes for the best biscuits. Now I'm going to add some chipotle peppers
which add amazing flavor and a little bit of spice and then a jar of drained pimentos because
this is pimento cheese biscuit dough and then another little handful of cheddar and for this
mixture I'm going to just fold it together. Oh my gosh. Okay now it's about halfway mixed together
so I'm going to add some Monterey Jack cheese and then some chopped fresh dill.
Okay you definitely don't want to overwork biscuit dough. Just keep folding until you don't see any
big bunches of dry flour and I am pretty much there. So now I have a whole bunch of things
I'm about to do to this dough. I'm gonna roll it, cut it, stack it, chill it, and bake it.
I'll get going with the first steps. First I'll flour the board, turn out the dough,
pat it, and roll it into a half inch thick square. Then I'll cut the dough into four equal squares
and stack them on top of each other. Next I'll roll the dough into another half inch thick square,
cut it one way, then the next into quarters, and stack them up. Then I'll repeat the steps,
cutting and stacking, but this time I'll sprinkle the remaining third cup of shredded cheddar on
the bottom three layers and put the final square of dough on top. Then same as before, roll it out,
this time to a three-quarter inch thick rectangle. Finally I'll cut it into nine squares with two
lines down, two across, and put it on a baking sheet. Chilling is the next step so I'll put the
biscuits in the fridge for 15 minutes. This will help them rise. Then comes baking. I'll put them
in a 425 degree oven for 15 minutes until they're golden brown. All right those beautiful biscuits
are baking in the oven, so while I wait on them I'm going to make that butter I told you about,
and it's sweet and spicy, my two favorite things. So I have a stick of salted butter and I let it
get pretty soft, and I'm adding just about a half a teaspoon or so of cayenne pepper,
and for the sweet, just a little bit of honey, it's that simple. So you don't have to add a whole
bunch of different ingredients. All right look at this, I love the color, that cayenne just adds those
pretty little flecks. Well guess what, those biscuits are ready. I'm going to grab those out
of the oven. They smell so good, I'm sure that doesn't surprise you. The color of these biscuits,
I mean look at how much they puffed up, and you can see those layers. The process of getting them
in the oven takes a little time, but it's always worth it when you see these. Oh my gosh, now as I
said I am going to deliver most of these to my dad. I have to have one of these, they are just
too irresistible. I'm going to break one open. Oh hot, so much yumminess, and I've got to spread
on some of this spicy sweet butter, just a little. I think of butter as like a condiment at this point,
I really slather it on. All right now I like to sprinkle on some extra dill, just a few little
leaves. What a treat this is. Well this is the first of my delicious bread recipes I'm going to
share with you today. You know I could just stop here, these are so amazing, but honestly when it
comes to bread, when have you ever known me to stop? If I ever stop and think about the different forms
of bread that happen in my kitchen on any given week, I mean we're talking from pizza crust,
to bread pudding, to french toast, to even croutons, it's a little astounding, I gotta be honest.
Well let's not forget about another form of bread I use all the time, bread crumbs. Now normally I
use store-bought plain bread crumbs, but I want to show you how to make fried mozzarella using
a combination of store-bought and fresh. I've just been crumbling up the fresh bread crumbs,
and I just used store-bought Italian sandwich bread, very simple, you can basically just use
any white bread, and I've crumbled it up to little little pieces, but there are still chunks of bread,
and that is going to make the bread crumb mixture so amazing. So I'm going to mix the fresh bread
crumbs with the store-bought bread crumbs. I'm going to go ahead and season these with salt and pepper,
and quite a bit of fresh chopped parsley, and some Italian seasoning, great combo. So of course
store-bought bread crumbs are always consistent, they're easy to keep in your pantries, but if you
mix in these fresh bread crumbs, you get a little bit more of that fresh bread flavor, and of course
the amazing texture. Okay now another thing I'm going to add to this bread crumb mixture is
shredded parmesan. Now you would think if you added parm to this breading mixture, you'd want to do
the finely grated kind of powdery parmesan, but I'm telling you these shreds are amazing,
and anything that you fry, they get those little kind of crispy parmesan edges, really really tasty.
All right now I'm going to bread the mozzarella for frying, and I'm just going to do one batch
to start with. So I've got just pre-sliced fresh mozzarella, and I'll drop a couple of pieces in
plain flour. This is just kind of a typical breading assembly line, and then shake off the
excess, dunk the pieces in egg, just beaten egg, and then drop it into the bread crumb mixture,
and then check and make sure they're coated. Then I'm going to do three more, so I'll have five to
fry. Okay now it's time to fry these beautiful babies. They look amazing. Now I have some oil
that is about 350 degrees, so I'll just very carefully lower these into the oil. Oh wow,
listen to that sizzle, and you as you can imagine these don't take long to cook at all.
So I'm going to move them around just a little bit, and you really want to watch it. This isn't
something you just want to drop in and then go do a load of laundry. You really need to watch.
All right, this is looking good. I'm going to start turning these over because I see that
the cheese is starting to melt. Goodness gracious. All righty, and it's not going to take long at all
on the second side, so I'm going to go ahead and get some warm marinara sauce into a dish. You have
to have marinara whenever you have fried mozzarella. It's a rule. You don't want to
break the rules. All righty, and then they come out. The only tricky thing about fried mozzarella
is you want to get them out of the oil before that cheese breaks loose because then you'll
have a mess on your hands. A delicious mess, yes, but still a mess. So this is really just
one serving in my opinion, maybe two servings for some, but just get them onto a plate with
the marinara sauce. I don't think there is anything better than this. All right, so not that
melted cheese needs any help at all, but I'm telling you what, this breading with the homemade
breadcrumbs, you have got to try this soon. I might let it cool down before I take a bite.
