My family loves these homemade buttermilk biscuits so much! If we have buttermilk in the fridge, you better believe we are making a batch of these biscuits! Easy, flaky, and delicious!

There’s no shortage of biscuit recipes on Inspired Taste. We’ve shared our got-to fluffy biscuits (which call for milk), easier drop biscuits, cheese biscuits, and, of course, these incredible buttermilk biscuits! They are best when you use real buttermilk, but if you don’t have any in the fridge, yes, you can absolutely use a buttermilk substitute. I’ve provided my go-to formula in the tips of our recipe.

Thanks to the buttermilk, these biscuits are soft and tender in the middle with the most perfect tangy flavor. I love them for breakfast (like with sausage gravy) and use them to make biscuit sandwiches. They also work really well served alongside dinner—a real keeper in my book! I can’t wait for you to try them!

Key Ingredients

• Flour: I usually stick with all-purpose flour for these biscuits, but if you want that super tender, melt-in-your-mouth texture, try soft white wheat flour. Brands like White Lilly, Martha White, or Bob’s Red Mill Fine Pastry Flour are great options.
• Buttermilk: I use regular part-skim buttermilk and always shake it before measuring. If you don’t have buttermilk, no worries! Mix 1 teaspoon white vinegar with 1/2 cup of whole milk and let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Real buttermilk is still the best, but this substitute will get you some solid biscuits.
• Butter: Cold, cold, cold! That’s the secret. The cold butter melts quickly in the oven, creating those little pockets of air that make the biscuits puff up perfectly. I use salted butter here, but unsalted butter is fine. Just remember you need to add an extra 1/4 teaspoon of salt.
• Sugar and Salt: These are the unsung heroes of a great biscuit! The sugar (just a tablespoon!) isn’t really for sweetness; it’s more about balancing the buttery richness. Even though we add sugar, these biscuits are still perfect for savory dishes. The salt is there to make them taste incredible. I use salted butter, so I only add a little extra salt. If you’re using unsalted butter, add an extra 1/4 teaspoon of fine salt to the flour.
• Baking Powder and Baking Soda: These are our leavening agents, so they make the biscuits rise and get that golden-brown color. I always use aluminum-free baking powder in my recipes, preventing a metallic taste.
• Egg: Now, I usually don’t add eggs to my biscuits, but for this recipe, it’s a game-changer! It adds tenderness and flavor and plays so well with the tangy buttermilk.

How to Make Buttermilk Biscuits

These homemade buttermilk biscuits start the same way our popular fluffy biscuits do. Add all the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt) to a food processor and pulse to mix. Then, pulse in cold butter cubes until you have tiny bits of cold butter throughout the mixture.

From there, you’ll transfer to a bowl and mix in buttermilk and a beaten egg. The dough will be pretty shaggy and may seem a little wet. Don’t worry about that! You can always add a little flour in a minute.

I empty the shaggy dough onto a floured work surface and gently bring it with my hands, patting it down into a rectangle. From there, I fold the dough like a letter, pat it out again, and repeat two more times. This brings the dough together and layers the butter on top of itself, helping the biscuits puff in the oven when we bake them. I use the same method when making these biscuits (the photo below is from that recipe, but the method is exactly the same).

You can use a cutter and cut these into round biscuits, but we skip the biscuit cutters and just cut the dough into squares. So easy!

When baking biscuits, you want the squares close together, so don’t spread them apart. Instead, place them pretty close to each other on a baking sheet, which really helps them puff up and bake to be nice and tall. And that’s it! I highly recommend enjoying your buttermilk biscuits warm from the oven with some butter or, better yet, homemade honey butter!