Butter Dip Biscuits - Retro Recipe Box (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to biscuits? ›

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.

The dough could be rather crumbly as it won't have enough fat to combine the dry ingredients. Also could be too dry if the butter is melted as there won't be enough 'liquid '. The end product could be a little tough as it's the butter that makes the biscuit short.

There is some actual science behind why White Lily flour is lighter than others and, thus, better suited for items like biscuits and cakes.

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.

For a soft and fluffy biscuit, scone or shortcake, fat pieces should be the size of coarse crumbs (Think of cake or muffin crumbs, not dried bread crumbs). Learn more about Fats in Baking. Arrange unbaked biscuits, scones or shortcakes closer together (they can almost touch) on the cookie sheet before baking.

So what's the final verdict? Butter is the winner here. The butter biscuits were moister with that wonderful butter taste and melt-in-your mouth texture. I'd be curious to test out substituting half or just two tablespoons of the butter with shortening to see if you get the best of both.

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

Bakers love buttermilk. It gives muffins, pancakes, and biscuits a tender, moist texture. If you love a cake because it's light and fluffy, chances are you have buttermilk to thank. As far as flavor goes, it's tangy.

Should I refrigerate 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 cold butter was better, yielding plenty of flakiness. But the best was the frozen butter, which made biscuits with the lightest, flakiest and softest texture, as well as with the highest rise. This is because the bits of frozen butter remained more intact during mixing than the cold butter.

The solution: Use half cake flour and half all-purpose flour. This combination will give you a biscuit with light and airy interior with a pleasant, satisfying bite on the outside. Also, sifting the flour and other dry ingredients will give you a smoother, airier dough.

As explained by Reader's Digest, these biscuits are traditionally made with flour ground from soft wheat, a variety of grain that grows readily in the American South due to its warm, humid climates. This type of wheat has about half as much gluten as hard wheat — the type of wheat used in bread flour.

Make sure your butter is at the correct temperature – use unsalted butter softened to room temperature for creaming and cold, unsalted butter for biscuits and pastries that require butter to be rubbed into the flour.

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.

For super light, crumbly biscuits try grating or pushing the yolks of hard-boiled eggs through a sieve into the biscuit dough. This increases the fat content and slows down the development of gluten. Cookie recipes on the other hand are more likely to contain eggs. Adding moisture as well as binding the mixture.

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.