Preheat your oven to 450°F. Start the race.
Mix the ingredients in a mixing bowl until you get a sticky, shaggy mess. You want the ingredients to be mixed, but if you have a good amount of dry spots that’s ok. Self-rising flour is made with soft wheat, so it can take more handling without getting tough, but don’t push it.
Turn your shaggy dough mess onto a well-floured cutting board, putting any dry bits on top. Sprinkle the top with flour and pat it out to a relatively flat mound.
At this point, we are going to do some rolling pin acrobatics, but don’t worry. If you can fold construction paper you can fold biscuit dough. If you don’t follow the folding instructions below, your biscuits will be too tender and will be very crumbly.
Roll the dough out until it’s a uniform square about 1/2 inch thick. It doesn’t have to be a perfect square, but aim for one. I use my pinky nail to measure the thickness, but I haven’t done a peer-reviewed study of pinky nail sizes, so you do you. Somewhere around 1/2 inch is good.
Draw a tic-tac-toe board onto the dough with your finger, dividing the dough into 9 squares. Take the right side of the dough and fold the three right-side squares onto the center ones. Do the same with the left. Now you have 3 vertical “squares.” Fold the top and the bottom onto the center square, stretching the dough as best as you can to cover the center square.
Re-flour your cutting board and turn the dough over so that the flap in on the bottom, and repeat the process. Flour the top, roll to 1/2 inch thick square, tic-tac-toe, fold right, fold left, fold top and bottom.
Re-flour and roll it out to a uniform 1/2 inch thick one more time. Now we are ready to cut the biscuits. Has the oven reached its preheat temp yet? Are you winning?
You have two choices here. You can cut the biscuits into squares to reduce waste, or you can cut circles and re-roll the dough scraps exactly once. Re-rolling the dough scraps past once will yield uglier and uglier biscuits.
Place the cut biscuits directly onto a lightly floured sheet pan, or onto a silicone baking mat over a sheet pan. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the tops are golden and the internal temperature of the center biscuits is 200°F.
Serve warm, or at room temperature. Biscuits can be frozen the same day they are made and reheated from frozen in an oven set to 350°F for 5-7 minutes.
