Tuesday's Tips, Tricks and Tid Bits ~ Cutting Butter Into Biscuits

Today's post is an incredibly short and simple one, but it's one that is very near and dear to my heart.  Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic.  But I do truly find this tip I'm about to mention to be one of the best ones I've discovered during my few short years of baking.

If you've ever tried to cut butter into a flour mixture for biscuits or a pastry you know how cumbersome this process can be.  Even if you have a pastry cutter it can still be quite frustrating.  If the butter gets too warm (FYI you're always supposed to use chilled butter with biscuits) then it begins to clump together instead of separating into pea sized bits like it's supposed to.

After one (okay, several) frustrating goes with this very scenario I decided that it might be a good idea to come up with a better solution.  You can also use a food processor to cut the butter into a flour mixture, but I really didn't want to drag mine out and then have to wash it.  I know that sounds so incredibly lazy, but the last thing I want to do after cooking a scrumptious meal and sitting down to enjoy it is tote myself right back into the kitchen to wash 10+ dishes.

So I froze the butter so that it would keep its shape.  When you're ready to add the butter to your flour mixture you simply pull it from the freezer and grate it.  I used one of those large cheese graters (I'm sure it has a more sophisticated name) and made sure to use the medium sized side of the grater so that my little pieces of butter would end up not too small nor too large.

Then you just dump the grated butter into the flour mixture and toss to combine.  And because the butter is frozen it doesn't clump and lump together, and you end up with perfectly even sized bits and pieces :)

Ta-da!!  What's your favorite baking tip?