Cornbread Biscuits

These Cornbread Biscuits are so damn good. They go well with pretty much everything a biscuit or a piece of cornbread would go with: soup, stew – they’re great with my Southwestern Chicken Stew – or just on the side of a fried chicken or rib plate. Most recently I served them alongside some Beef Stew and rice. A perfect accompaniment for sure.

Cornbread Biscuits Ingredients

Feel free to jump to the full recipe, but here are useful notes about the ingredients you will need to make this Cornbread Biscuits recipe:

• All-purpose flour, yellow cornmeal: Self-rising flour and self-rising cornmeal are both fine to use as substitutions. You can also use white cornmeal. Yellow feels more like corn to me, so that’s what I go with. If you use both self-rising flour and cornmeal omit or reduce the baking soda and baking powder called for.
• Granulated sugar, fine sea salt, flaky sea salt: Lots of sugar! These Cornbread Biscuits are not as sweet as cake, but it’s pretty damn sweet. This is not the place for savory cornbread recipes – odds are next to zero you’ll ever see one here. You can reduce the sugar to just a couple of tablespoons without too much change to the texture if you don’t like sweet cornbread. You’ll need the salt unless you are using salted butter. If you are, you might not need extra salt at all. Trust your tastebuds. The flaky salt is for topping the biscuits and is optional.
• Baking soda, baking powder: For lift. As mentioned above, if your cornmeal and/or flour is self-rising, you can omit or reduce the amounts of these by half.
• Butter: I prefer salted butter, but you can use what you like. If you use unsalted you’ll need to fiddle with the amount of salt in this recipe to make sure your biscuits aren’t bland.
• Buttermilk, whole milk: It’s not cornbread – or biscuits – without buttermilk! But, whole milk is actually. a fine substitute here. You could also brush the tops of your Cornbread Biscuits with buttermilk instead of whole milk. That’s up to you.

How to Make Cornbread Biscuits

Full instructions are included in the recipe below, but here is a basic overview of what you’ll need to do, along with some important tidbits to help you make the most of this Cornbread Biscuits recipe:

• Get ready to make Cornbread Biscuits. Preheat oven to 425°F. Preheat your oven to 425°F and place a rack in the center. Sift the flour, cornmeal, baking soda, and baking powder together into a metal mixing bowl, then use a wooden spoon or silicone spatula to stir in the sugar until everything is well combined.
• Form the dough. Add all of the cold, diced butter to the bowl. Use a pastry cutter to work the cold butter into the cornmeal and flour mixture until no pieces of butter larger than a pea remain. Use your fingers or a fork if that’s easier. Next, make a well in the center of the bowl. Pour the cold buttermilk into the center of the bowl. Moving your spoon or spatula around the edges of the bowl, push the flour over the top of the buttermilk, as if you’re trying to hide it. As it begins to come together, begin to fold the dough from the center outwards, and scooping it up from the bottom to get the flour moistened. You want to be gentle here, very light and deliberate in your mixing. Too much motion and too much force will make for dense, heavy biscuits. When the dough has just come together – there’s mostly one big mass sitting in the bowl – lightly flour your work surface and turn the bowl out onto it.
• Shape the biscuits. Grab a rolling pin and tap the mound until it’s all even in height. Begin to gently – you don’t need to add weight, just a bit of pressure – roll out the dough. Try to work it into a specific shape – an oval if you’re using a round biscuit cutter, or a rectangle if you’re making square Cornbread Biscuits. Once you’ve rolled the dough out to about 1/2″ in thickness, go ahead and cut out your biscuits. If you’re using a biscuit cutter or cup make sure you don’t twist it – that will make it harder for them to rise as they bake. I like to shape it into a rectangle, then use my pastry cutter to cut the rectangle into squares or smaller rectangles. 
• Brush and bake. Place the Cornbread Biscuits on a baking sheet lined with foil or a silicone mat. Brush the tops of the biscuits with whole milk, then sprinkle a bit of flaky salt over the tops of each one. Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes. They should be deeply golden brown and fully cooked through. Dassit! 

Other Cornbread Recipes You’ll Enjoy

I love cornbread! Sweet, fluffy cornbread, specifically. Here are some of my previous cornbread options:

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