Simple Tips to Light and Fluffy Biscuits (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to fluffy biscuits? ›

"Pinch the flour and fat together like you're snapping your fingers," he explains. This creates thin sheets of butter that create puff pastry-like layers in your biscuits. For soft and fluffy biscuits, blend the liquid and dry ingredients just until the dough "resembles cottage cheese," Sonoskus says.

Biscuit Tip 1: Use cold ingredients

When you cut in your fat, you leave it in small pea-sized lumps. Those lumps get coated in flour and melt during baking into layers. If your fats are too warm, the lumps will melt and form a hom*ogeneous dough, resulting in dense, leaden biscuits.

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.

With biscuits, however, the goal is to avoid this chewiness. So, by adding hard-boiled egg yolk to a biscuit recipe, you'll thwart the formation of gluten, thereby resulting in a buttery, flakey crumb that'll dissolve in your mouth.

Baking soda is a much more powerful leavener than baking powder, about 3-4 times as strong. 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.

The butter version rises the highest — look at those flaky layers! The shortening biscuit is slightly shorter and a bit drier, too. Butter contains a bit of water, which helps create steam and gives baked goods a boost.

What's the Difference Between Buttermilk Biscuits and Regular Biscuits? As the names might suggest, regular biscuits do not contain buttermilk, while these do. Regular biscuits are typically prepared with milk or water instead. Buttermilk adds a nice tang to the biscuit flavor and helps them rise better.

Whenever you're working with buttery doughs like biscuits, pie crust, shortbread, and the like, you're constantly reminded to chill the dough frequently, as well as chill the dough before baking time. Baking biscuits directly from frozen also keeps the biscuits from spreading and flattening out.

Baking Powder and Baking Soda: We use 5 teaspoons of baking powder in this biscuit recipe. I know that seems like a lot, but trust me. The extra baking powder makes our biscuits fluffy and tender, and baking soda helps them brown nicely.

What happens when you add more butter to biscuits? ›

Increasing the amount of butter definitely makes the biscuit "taste" softer, more crumbly, and more flaky.

The biggest tip for creating tall and flaky biscuits is to put the biscuits in the freezer for 15 minutes before baking them. Once they are on the baking sheet, just pop the whole thing in the freezer.

While biscuits receive some leavening power from chemical sources — baking powder and baking soda — the difference between serviceable and greatness comes from the extra rise that steam provides. In order to generate steam, the oven must be set at a minimum of 425 degrees for at least 10 minutes prior to baking.

The process simply involves using a pastry brush to lightly coat the top of your unbaked biscuits with a liquid ingredient known to create that browning effect once heated. One of the most popular choices for this is cream, which imparts a rich golden color to the crust.

What does egg wash do to biscuits? Egg washing the tops of your biscuits is the key to perfect golden brown and shiny tops. Don't skip this step.

This results in a looser dough that can expand and puff up more. The egg white on the other hand acts as a coagulant and sets the crumb making it bouncier and chewier in a good way. Crust is another part of the bread that is greatly affected by egg. It caramelises more and becomes crispier.

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.

Each time you cut and push the dough, the resulting biscuits are less likely to rise and be fluffy. By the third or fourth time, the biscuits will not rise as high as the first two rounds. The small amount of leftover dough after that can be fun for children (or fun adults) to play with.

*Substitute buttermilk, light cream, or heavy cream for the whole milk, if you prefer; use enough of whatever liquid you choose to bring the dough together readily, without you having to work it too much. The higher-fat liquid you use, the more tender and richer-tasting your biscuits will be.

The cornstarch lowers the protein of the flour, which produces a more tender biscuit. The heavy cream provides the fat that helps create the flaky layers in great biscuits.

Is self-rising or all-purpose flour better for biscuits? ›

All purpose flour is a bit of higher protein content than self-rising flour which is made from a soft winter wheat. This is why Southerners swear by using self-rising flour in their biscuits. If you don't have any you can make your own self-rising flour.

One of the main roles of milk in baking is to provide moisture. It can help to keep baked goods from becoming too dry and crumbly, and can also add tenderness to the texture.