Mile High Perfect Biscuits 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.

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

To bake tall biscuits place you want to place biscuits next to each other, with edges touching on the baking sheet. If you separate the biscuits and bake them too far apart, they won't rise as tall.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*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.

Basically, you pat the dough out into a rectangle, then fold it up into thirds (like you're folding a letter to put in an envelope), then repeat that process. This trick applies to scones too. This step ensures your biscuits will bake up tall, with distinct layers of flaky goodness.

What are the two most important steps in biscuit making? ›

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.

Biscuits are a type of quick bread (because they require no rising time before baking) with their moon in pastry. Like pastry dough, biscuits get their tender crumb and layers from the suspension of fat in flour.

If you start asking around, any Southern chef, Southern Living Test Kitchen pro, or biscuit-making family member will swear by White Lily flour. Generations of bakers have claimed it as the secret to the perfect, flaky biscuit.

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.

They're More Tender

Back to that gluten—it's responsible for giving baked goods their chew, so the lower gluten content of flour made from soft red winter wheat means that biscuits made with it are more tender than those made with other flours that aren't.

Pillai became known in India as the 'Biscuit King' or 'Biscuit Baron'. He took over Nabisco's other Asian subsidiaries. Pillai then established links with Boussois-Souchon-Neuvesel (BSN), the French food company, and by 1989 controlled six Asian companies worth over US$400 million.

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.

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.