This is a story about the little things, the things we take for granted and by taking a fresh look, you see the familiar in a new light, one that offers a new lease on an old idea. No, I am not talking about your family members or your pet or even a plate of tagliatelle with ragú Bolognese. I am talking about the mystery of baking powder biscuits.

Let me start by throwing out a name you probably don’t know—Nika Hazelton. She wrote American Home Cooking as well as 29 other cookbooks and was a food columnist for the National Review. She also had little patience for fussy or gourmet cooking—her favorite recipes did not cost a fortune in ingredients nor require advanced culinary skills nor a lot of fuss to prepare. And Nika was the source of my long-standing recipe for baking powder biscuits, the ones I have baked for half a century. Long ago I memorized my version of that recipe: 2 cups flour, 7 tablespoons shortening (butter/Crisco mix), 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon baking soda, ½ teaspoon salt and buttermilk to bring the dough together, about a cup.

The results are good, solid rounds of biscuits that bake for 12 minutes at 425 degrees. Perfect for a weekend morning with hungry kids to feed and delightful cut in half, shmeared with soft salted butter, and slathered with honey, Steen’s syrup, or whatever marmalade or jam you have on hand.

The problem was, however, that I had also fallen in love with Mexican Bisquetes that are rolled out and then folded, the dough creating layers and a more impressive final result. So back I went to take a fresh look.

My first thought was to create a simple formula, one that doesn’t require a recipe. That formula was 2:1—2 cups of flour and everything else is a one: a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon each of baking powder and soda, a teaspoon of kosher salt (I trim this in half if using salted butter), one stick butter and one cup buttermilk. Pulse the dry ingredients in a food processor (you can do this by hand), add the butter cut into pieces, and pulse again until the butter is completely cut into the flour (no “pea-sized” pieces please). Remove to a large bowl, add buttermilk to pull together a cohesive dough, roll out gently on a floured surface, cut into biscuits and bake in a hot oven.

What was missing was a nicely layered biscuit and one that would rise super-high in the oven. I wanted a bit of performance art here, the type of biscuit that encourages a gasp of delight when the baking sheet hits the cooling rack. “Wow, great biscuits!”

The answer, as was the case with bisquetes, is to roll out the dough into a rectangle, fold like a letter, and repeat twice. The big surprise was my assumption, based on Nika’s recipe, that biscuit dough needs to be treated gently. This dough got roughed up yet still produced high-top biscuits. One other small trick—for the last roll, the dough should be a good one-inch thick which means about 8 biscuits total. You can also vary the size of the biscuit cutter—a 2 ¼-inch cutter is standard here—but a smaller one will produce super-high biscuits that are so top-heavy that they fall over and a larger cutter will mean a more stable, traditional shape.

One last trick. I tried baking these biscuits using the convection setting but I did not lower the oven temp from 425 degrees to 400. They baked in about 10 minutes instead of twelve and they looked great, nicely browned all over. So if you have a convection oven, this is a great place to use it and no need to lower the oven temperature.

Chris Kimball

Christopher Kimball is founder of Milk Street, which produces Milk Street Magazine, Milk Street Television on PBS, and the weekly public radio show Milk Street Radio. He founded Cook’s Magazine in 1980 and was host and executive producer of America’s Test Kitchen until 2016. Kimball is the author of several books, including "The Yellow Farmhouse" and "Fannie’s Last Supper."