Sour Cream and Green Onion Biscuits

Biscuits are great dinner sides. They’re tasty, and putting together a batch is actually very quick and easy – especially when you compare it to relatively time consuming alternatives, like making yeasted dinner rolls. Biscuits are usually made to be plain, with all of their flavor coming from butter, buttermilk or cream included in the dough. As a result, they can be served with all kinds of dishes, both sweet and savory. If you know what you’re planning to serve the biscuits with, however, it’s easy to flavor the dough to make them a little more interesting.

For these savory biscuits, I used sour cream and green onion to flavor them. Sour cream adds a light tanginess to the biscuits, in much the same way that buttermilk does, and the green onion is a nice complement to it. Since sour cream is a bit thicker than buttermilk, I found that I needed to use a bit more “liquid” than I usually do when I’m baking biscuits.

Making biscuits takes a bit of practice to get them turning out picture perfect, much like pie crust does. But just like pie crust, the method is actually very easy. Butter is cut in to the dry ingredients and liquid – or sour cream, in this case – is added to bind everything together. The dough should be gently kneaded before being rolled out. This allows gluten to develop, giving the biscuits a higher rise, and it also distributes the butter so you get a flakier finished biscuit.

Sour Cream and Green Onion Biscuits
2 cups all purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 cup butter, chilled and cut into pieces
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup chopped green onion

Preheat oven to 400F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar.
Add butter to bowl and rub into flour mixture with your fingertips until mixture resembles very coarse sand. The average piece should be about the size of a pea. Stir in sour cream and green onions until dough is moistened, then turn out on to a lightly floured surface and lightly knead until the ball comes together smoothly. Press dough out until it is 1/2-inch thick.
Use a 2 1/2-3 inch round cookie/biscuit cutter to cut rounds, then place on baking sheet. Dough can be gathered and rerolled once. You should get about 10 biscuits, depending on size of the biscuit cutter.
Bake for 20-24 minutes, until tops of biscuits are golden and sides are puffed and firm.
Cool on a wire rack before serving.

Makes about 10 biscuits