Our easiest ever biscuit recipes (2024)

FAQs

How did they make biscuits in the old days? ›

With no leavening agents except the bitter-tasting pearlash available, beaten biscuits were laboriously beaten and folded to incorporate air into the dough which expanded when heated in the oven causing the biscuit to rise.

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.

White Lily brand flour, especially the self-rising flour, is the gold standard among Southern cooks who make biscuits on a regular basis. White lily, self rising. I use it for everything except those thing I make using either cake flour or yeast. If I'm using yeast I use King Arthur flours.

Southern cooks have several tricks when it comes to making tender and delicious biscuits, from the cutters they use, to the type and amount of liquid incorporated, to the number of kneads required to turn out a perfect dough. The not-so-secret ingredient they rely upon is soft wheat flour.

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.

Heavy Cream.

The heavy cream adds flavor to the biscuit by adding a little more fat and helps hydrate the dough. The extra fat in the heavy cream is helpful because buttermilk in stores is often “low-fat” buttermilk.

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.

What makes biscuits taste better? ›

Brush the biscuits with butter after baking

“If you want the most luscious biscuits ever, brush the tops with melted butter after they come out of the oven,” says James. Brushing the butter on after baking ensures that the butter soaks into the baked biscuit so you get that great buttery flavor in every bite.

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 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.

Whether you're making round or square biscuits, be sure you're using a knife or biscuit cutter, and that you're not twisting as you cut. It's important to create a clean cut that won't smoosh those outside layers onto one another, as that will bind the layers together and inhibit the puffing that creates height.