Every time I go to make biscuits, which is fairly often because they’re one of my favorite foods, I wind up ranting to myself a bit about the current place biscuits hold in our cultural canon. If you Google (or DuckDuckGo, winkwink, we’re all going to be mass surveilled and then die) how to make biscuits, you’re very likely to find a member of the mostly male info-splain cooking sites telling you that the best biscuits are laminated, like pastry dough, and require butter no warmer than 1 unit above absolute zero, and if you’re trying to make them without a sacrifice to the GMO gods, well, that’s your mistake isn’t it? Those same sites will then give you no fewer than 6 recipes for Artisan Bread In The Time It Takes You To Smell A Fart.

There’s nothing wrong with artisan bread, or science, or pastry dough for that matter. My mom never cooked from a new recipe without testing it first, and writing down her tests, which makes her roughly the same level of “scientist” as the yahoos at America’s Test Kitchen. But the thing about this simultaneous obsession with complex biscuits and ridiculously easy “artisan” bread is that biscuits, my guy, are a quickbread. Quickbreads, as a category, were the original “bread in 5 minutes”, and to that category should they return.

Here’s how I make biscuits: 2c flour, a shake of salt, a shake of sugar, some baking powder (1tbsp, ish), slightly over half a stick of butter squished into the flour, enough water with evaporated milk (or normal milk) to make it all hang together. Then I sqush them with my hands till they’re more or less biscuits shaped and pop them into the oven at 450F for 15-20 minutes.

Easy, right? No artisan bread recipe, no matter how well designed, will ever be that simple or that low-skill. And that’s okay! Because they’re different things! Similarly, biscuits that have laminated dough so they have Pillsbury-style pull-away layers are usually tasty, but they’ll take a lot longer than the dump-and-mix method, and frankly I’m not convinced they’re any better.

Give actual quickbreads a try sometimes. You’ll enjoy it.