Nori (Seaweed) Biscuits
Who’s ready for the long weekend?! Reuben and I are packing up for a weekend in Garden Valley! It’s a few hours north of San Francisco in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We haven’t planned anything but I do know that our Airbnb has a pool, so I’m really hoping Reuben let’s us just chill out at the house and float for a few hours. He has a tendency to trick me into +10 mile long hikes up really big mountains, when he very well knows I have the athleticism of a baked potato.
I’ve been looking forward to this trip for months! I love just getting out of the city. We’ve spent some time near Garden Valley before and everything is so quaint and quiet. People have space and peace to move around without fear of stepping on scary sidewalk objects or bumping into a crazy person. I’m especially looking forward to hitting up some farmers markets up there and hoping to find something new I haven’t eaten or cooked with before!
I’m not sure yet if we’re going to be cooking meals up there yet. I sort of hate cooking in Airbnbs… okay, hate is not the right word… it’s just very challenging. Airbnb kitchens look cute but then the knives are sooooo dull, the pots and pans are weird sizes, and the bowls are too small. I rather just bring up a box of my own kitchen things, but then that in itself is not very relaxing.
Easy Weekend Breakfast
Breakfast is normally pretty doable though, no matter what your basic kitchen set up is like. For eggs and bacon, all you really need is a frying pan! But would you think of homemade buttermilk biscuits as an easy-no-fancy-kitchen-tool-necessary breakfast option? Well, ya should! 3 years ago when we first moved into our apartment together I couldn’t stop making biscuits because they were so easy to make, I felt so proud of myself for whipping up a fresh bread like thing in the morning! Since then, I’ve continued to adapt my basic buttermilk biscuit recipe with new ingredients I’m loving at the moment. I’ve done everything bagel biscuits, classic cheddar scallion, an asian everything bagel seasoning (with Sichuan peppercorns, coconut, sesame seeds, and salt), and now I’ve brought you Nori Buttermilk Biscuits!
Nori Buttermilk Biscuits
Nori, if you didn’t already know, is roasted seaweed! You typically find them in large square sheets for rolling sushi, gimbap, spam musubis, and onigiri, but the packages of seaweed snacks are essentially the same thing! I could eat seaweed snacks endlessly. It’s like eating light wafers of salty ocean. That’s a good thing. I love adding nori sheets to my noodles soups or crumbling up the sheets to sprinkle over rice (like furikake) or salads. There are A LOT of Korean seaweed snacks at my go-to Asian market, so I always end up grab some of those when I’m shopping!
When you add pieces of nori into layers of flaky buttermilk biscuits, it will be hard to go back to just plain biscuits! It adds so much flavor to the biscuits - extra saltiness and a lot of umami that pairs so well with the rich buttery flavor of the biscuit dough. They taste amazing fresh out of the oven with a pat of butter or a light drizzle of honey. But imagine them with some eggs, crispy bacon, gooey cheese, or a crunchy piece of fried chicken in the middle! OMGGGGGGG Okay, maybe I’ll try to pack the fixings for a little nori buttermilk biscuit breakfast this weekend!
Nori Buttermilk Biscuits
Makes 15-18 biscuits
Materials:
3 C all purpose flour + more for dusting
1 cup torn nori/seaweed sheets
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
8 tbsp frozen butter
1 1/2 cup cold buttermilk
2 tbsp melted butter
Furikake - for topping
steps:
Preheat your oven to 450 degrees
In a medium bowl, combine flour, torn nori, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix to combine.
Cut your butter into 1/2" cubes. Add the cubed butter into the flour mixture. Incorporate the butter into the flour mixture by pinching the butter with the tips of your fingers and breaking them apart. You still want to be able to see the chunks of butter. The flour mixture should be crumbly and sandy. Pour in the buttermilk and mix everything with a wooden spoon or by hand until just combined.
Lightly flour your work surface and dump your biscuit mixture onto it. Knead the dough for 2 - 3 mins until you have a consistent dough ball. Roll out your dough into a rectangle and fold the dough onto itself in thirds. Roll out into a rectangle again and fold the dough onto itself in thirds one more time. You just built in your layers!
Roll out your dough until it is ½” thick and cut out biscuits using a 2 ½” - 3” round cutter. Avoid twisting the biscuit cutter as you lift up, that will seal the layers and they won’t be as flakey.
Place the biscuits on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Brush melted butter on each biscuit and sprinkle furikake on each biscuit. Bake the biscuits for 12-15 minutes until golden brown.
Allow to slightly cool and enjoy with butter.