Our easiest ever biscuit recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to a good biscuit? ›

Use Cold Butter for Biscuits

For flaky layers, use cold butter. When you cut in the butter, you have coarse crumbs of butter coated with flour. When the biscuit bakes, the butter will melt, releasing steam and creating pockets of air. This makes the biscuits airy and flaky on the inside.

Crisco may be beneficial for other baking applications, but for biscuit making, butter is the ultimate champion!

Just as important as the fat is the liquid used to make your biscuits. Our Buttermilk Biscuit recipe offers the choice of using milk or buttermilk. Buttermilk is known for making biscuits tender and adding a zippy tang, so we used that for this test.

beaten biscuits are what people made in the days before baking soda and baking powder was around. In order to get the biscuits to rise, cooks would beat the dough with a mallet, rolling pin, or even an ax for over half an hour util it blistered.”

Buttermilk adds a tangy flavor to the biscuits and makes them slightly more tender. Butter: We use salted European butter in this recipe. It will work with unsalted or salted butter. I like the extra saltiness of salted butter, but you can reduce the salt to 3/4 teaspoon if you prefer.

Buttermilk can produce better results when baking biscuits than using regular milk or cream. Buttermilk is acidic and when it is combined with baking soda, it creates a chemical reaction that produces carbon dioxide gas, which causes the dough to rise and gives the biscuits a light and flaky texture.

Buttermilk adds a nice tang to the biscuit flavor and helps them rise better.

Buttermilk Biscuits vs. Cream Biscuits

Buttermilk is used in biscuit-making for its acid and fat content. Its acidity works with the leaveners to help the dough rise, producing a taller and fluffier biscuit. Buttermilk also adds a subtle tang. Cream biscuits are made with heavy cream.

White Lily brand flour, especially the self-rising flour, is the gold standard among Southern cooks who make biscuits on a regular basis.

Should you chill biscuit dough before baking? ›

But if you chill your pan of biscuits in the fridge before baking, not only will the gluten relax (yielding more tender biscuits), the butter will harden up. And the longer it takes the butter to melt as the biscuits bake, the more chance they have to rise high and maintain their shape. So, chill... and chill.

The earliest biscuits were a simple combination of flour and water that resulted in little more than baked paste. Soon people learned that adding fat to the recipe made them tasty and flaky. In the Northern states butter is the favored lipid. In the South, lard or shortening is the standard.

That is why you will notice that recipes usually call for a small amount of baking soda, typically ¼ teaspoon per 1 cup of flour. Do not make the mistake of trying to substitute equal parts baking soda for baking powder in recipes. Your baked goods will have no leavening, be quite flat, and have an altered taste.

THE ABERFFRAW BISCUIT (or cake) goes by a number of names, but whatever you call it, with a tradition dating back to the 13th century, it's often held up as the oldest recognised biscuit in Britain.

The two keys to success in making the best biscuits are handling the dough as little as possible as well as using very cold solid fat (butter, shortening, or lard) and cold liquid. When the biscuits hit the oven, the cold liquid will start to evaporate creating steam which will help our biscuits get very tall.

Mixing. The multi-stage mixing method is preferred for its ability to produce consistent doughs which are not fully developed. Blending all dry ingredients to rub or cut the shortening into the flour until fat is fully distributed and pea-sized lumps are visible.

In terms of flakiness, the best fat for making biscuits is probably lard, and vegetable shortening is the next best. In terms of flavor, however, butter is undoubtedly the best, with lard a close second.

A hot oven helps biscuits bake—and rise—quickly. We recommend 475˚F for 15 minutes. Remove them from the oven as soon as they are lightly brown.