Best quick biscuit recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to an excellent 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.

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.

Conclusion: Either butter or shortening is fine; there's no clear advantage of one over the other (except that butter is easier to incorporate into the dough by hand, especially if you grate it like cheese).

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.

As far as brands of flour, White Lily “all-purpose” flour has been my go-to for biscuit making. It's a soft red winter wheat, and the low protein and low gluten content keep biscuits from becoming too dense.

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.

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

1 cup of milk (or water, or buttermilk) per 2 cups of flour is a pretty good ratio, but it's really not that important.

Sugar and Salt: Add flavor. We don't add a lot of sugar (just 1 tablespoon). Cold Butter: I love using European-style salted butter, like Kerrygold or Plugra, since they make our biscuits tender and delicious. If you don't have European salted butter, plain butter works (salted or unsalted).

Keep the oven hot.

When baking buttery treats like biscuits, the key is to bake them at a temperature where the water in the butter turns quickly to steam. This steam is a big part of how the biscuits achieve their height, as it evaporates up and out.

Which fat makes the best biscuits? ›

High-fat butter, such as Kerrygold Butter, is best. The rich fat from the butter releases water when the biscuits are baking which is what contributes to the beautiful layers and flakiness that we love about biscuits.

Cutting butter into flour or other dry ingredients is an essential part of preparing pastry dough, biscuits and crumbly pie toppings because it gives a light and flaky texture that can't be replicated with any other technique.

Secret to Fluffy Biscuits #1: Use cold butter

Cold butter will not be fully absorbed by the flour which means you will have small chunks visible in the dough. Those pieces when they are in the oven will melt, and the water in the butter will steam causing the layers of flour to push apart creating flaky layers.

Fat is also important because it adds tenderness to the dough; full-fat buttermilk and European-style butter can help with texture, but "full-fat" is the critical point — sour cream, olive oil, and nut milks can all be used to create successful biscuits, provided they have a high-fat content.

in this case, it appears that the biscuit structure is just a lot more stable (structurally speaking) when there's less butter. When you get a lot of butter, you're kind of filling your biscuit with holes, which makes it unable to bear its own weight to rise very far.

As it turns out, adding hard-boiled egg yolks to your biscuit dough is a way to ward off an overworked, tough dough that can be the downfall of a butter-based pastry. When the trick is employed, the pastry shatters and then dissolves in your mouth quickly, tasting like a knob of flaky butter.

Here's the Reason Biscuits in the South Really Are Better

The not-so-secret ingredient they rely upon is soft wheat flour. Soft wheat thrives in temperate, moist climates like that of the mid-Atlantic, so cooks in those areas have had access to its special flour for a long time.