Maple Bacon Biscuits

in Bread, Breakfast, Freezer Friendly, Pork

Maple Bacon Biscuits

I’m ready for 2013. Like ready ready. I stepped onto the bathroom scale this morning and it said “error.” It’s such a jerk sometimes. Like when it randomly tells me I weigh 10lbs less than I did the day before… and then 6lbs more 8 seconds later. But it does have a point.

So all of those wonderful Trade Joe’s goodies that Santa left in our stocking have an “Eat before Monday or get hidden on the top shelf that you can’t reach without getting a chair from the dining room – and we both know you’re far too lazy to go get a chair from the dining room” label on them and the pages of my new Cooking Light Cookbook are littered with post it tab bookmarks.

Our post-holiday detox starts Tuesday. But until then, there’s bacon. And biscuits.

And Trader Joe’s Sweet-Salty-Nutty Trek Mix that is like crack. Certifiable crack.

On a quiet Saturday morning when the not-so-little-anymore one is at Gia & PaPaw’s house for the weekend, we sat down to a quick & simple breakfast of peppery Maple Bacon Biscuits, eggs, and some grapefruit juice.

Crumbly, airy biscuits made with bacon grease and sweetened with maple syrup. And it was the first recipe I made from my new Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. Flipping through it for the first time, I spotted them on page 28. And then I ran to the kitchen to make them immediately.

And then I immediately ate two straight out of the oven, mostly in celebration that the first recipe from a new cookbook turned out to be such a huge homerun. And partly because it was 4:30pm and that’s when I kick myself every single day for not having a snack an hour earlier.

I added a healthy dose of black pepper to help balance the sweet & savory just enough to almost make them a meal in itself. (“Almost,” like eating 2 biscuits wasn’t all of the calories I had left for dinner the other day.) I also made a double batch to be able to make the biscuits bigger than the 2-inch originals. And just a note – the dough was softer than expected for the double batch and I ended up kneading in a bit more flour after cutting the first few biscuits and realizing that they would spread quite a bit (and they did). The “extra flour” biscuits baked up nicely.

Maple Bacon Biscuits

Make breakfast really count with these sweet, crumbly biscuits studded with crispy bacon and black pepper.

Ingredients

  • 5 slices thick-cut bacon
  • Black pepper
  • 1/2 cup maple syrup
  • 3 1/4 cups flour, plus more for work surface
  • 4 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • ~8 Tbsp (1 stick) butter (see note below)
  • 1/2 cup buttermilk (I whisked 1/4 cup 2% milk with 1/4 cup fat-free Greek yogurt)
  • You want 12 Tbsp total between the butter and the grease reserved from cooking the bacon. If you end up with more bacon grease than 4 Tbsp, you can reduce the butter accordingly. And if you end up with less bacon grease, you can use more butter. Make sense? Good. Let's get started.

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 425.
  2. Fry the bacon until crisp and transfer to a paper towel-lined plate to cool.
  3. Turn off the heat and add several generous dashes/grinds of black pepper to the pan and stir, letting the pepper cook for ~10 seconds.
  4. Pour the rendered bacon grease and pepper (scrape the peppery bits out if necessary) into a heat-safe measuring cup and stick it in the freezer to solidify.
  5. Chop the bacon into chunks and transfer to a small bowl, pouring the maple syrup over top.
  6. In a large bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together and add the butter chunks and the bacon grease (use a spoon to scrape out the measuring cup).
  7. Using a pastry cutter or your hands, cut the butter and bacon grease into the dry ingredients until well mixed (no large chunks) and the mixture is mealy.
  8. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the buttermilk and maple-bacon mixture and stir/fold until your dough forms.
  9. Turn your dough onto a generously floured surfaced and give it a few kneads to come together and then pat it to 1-inch thick .
  10. Using a floured round cutter, cut as many rounds as you can and then pat the dough back together and repeat until the dough is gone - I got 10 biscuits using a 2.75-inch cutter.
  11. Place biscuits on a lined baking sheet (sides just barely touching) and bake 12-14 minutes or until the tops are golden.
  12. Serve warm. Leftovers reheated nicely for the 2-3 days they stuck around.

Notes

Yields: 10 biscuits

Slightly adapted from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

Estimated time: 35 minutes

18 comments… add one
  • I’m so ready for 2013 too! Bring on the “diet”! But first, I need to make these biscuits! Then add on the eggs and bacon and cheesy goodness in between 🙂

  • Haha, I have a similar situation going on with my Trader Joe’s goodies though here’s it’s candy cane joe-joe’s and white chocolate covered pretzels… Anyway, not sure how I missed these biscuits on my first flip through the SK cookbook. I’d give anything to have one appear here for breakfast this morning 🙂

  • these look so good. we always have some type of biscuits in our house. i guess we are better known as biscuits people. i am going to have to add this one to our repertoire! lol. our family would enjoy these!

  • These were so good! I had no idea you have a cookbook, I’m ordering mine now!

  • Ugh, I braved the scale this morning too…I’m choosing to believe it’s broken. These look so delicious, and well worth gaining a pound or two for 🙂

  • I guess I’m kind of blessed that we don’t have Trader Joe’s over here. I think I’d be slightly obese if I had access to one…

    And maple bacon biscuits! That’s kind of evil, isn’t it. I wanted to make some maple bacon something a few months ago and made candied bacon in order to prepare. But I ate all the candied bacon as soon as it cooled. I couldn’t stop. I even had to hide the fact that I had made candied bacon so that the husband wouldn’t nag me about eating a whole package (it was only like 150 grams… but still) of bacon. I got queasy and since then I haven’t had a problem with candied bacon cravings. 😀 That was my first and last experience with that.

    But this isn’t candied! These I could do.

  • Patti T.

    These sound wickedly good. My husband would love these. He had a similar story to the lady above who ate the candied bacon. We stayed at a bed and breakfast and we were the only guests but she seemed to have cooked for 8 or 10 people, well when she set the bacon down on the table and he tasted them, he went back and got 4 more slices, then 4 more and just kept going until he had eaten the whole platter. Good thing we had gone hiking after breakfast so we could work off the bounteous breakfast!

  • I’ve been trying to force myself to eat everything craveworthy in my apartment before monday night also…not sure that’s the best solution though. 🙂 Which Cooking Light cookbook did you get??

  • Jen

    Um…are you perhaps missing a step in the instructions? It doesn’t indicate where or how to use the butter or bacon grease (after frozen.) I assume you cut them into the dry ingredients before adding the buttermilk and maple syrup. These look delicious, can’t wait to try them.

    • Fixed – thanks for the catch!

      • Jen

        I just got done making these, and they’re amazing! They turned out so flaky and tender (which might have something to do with the brand new pastry cutter my husband got me for Christmas.) I like that they are not overly sweet; a little maple flavor goes a long way for me, I think it can overpower other flavors quickly if too much is used. But these were perfect. I should start saving bacon grease to use for this recipe; I only got about 2 tablespoons and had to make the rest up with butter, but I bet a couple more tablespoons of bacon fat would make them even more decadent.

  • I love the idea of maple, bacon, and biscuits all together 🙂 And yes, my cooking light magazine has many pages torn out from it. 🙂

  • I’ll be detoxing along with you too next month! So true about those pesky leftover holiday sweets…great recipe I’ll have to try it on my next “cheat day”! 🙂

  • Great ingredients here….It’s kind of like breakfast in a biscuit, minus the egg. Good thing those are easy to serve alongside!

    Yet another reason why her cookbook is at the top of my list…

  • Isn’t that cookbook wonderful? I made the cheddar swirl buns on page 49… Oh gosh too good for words.
    These biscuits look amazing!

  • These look amazing!!!!!

  • Joey (Worlds best chef in the making)

    I’ve made these twice now. The first time around I said to myself “these are good, but, they aren’t very mapley or bacony. But they were good.” So the second time around I made two extra slices of bacon and added an extra 1/4 cup of syrup ( I LOVE the taste of maple syrup.) They came out perfect. Nice and sweet, but not so sweet as to over power everything else. Both times i also ended up with 14 biscuits by taking the dough and rolling it into balls then flattening them with my palm.

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