Biscuits: Fat & Flavor — Tanorria's Table (2024)

FAQs

What 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.

Improved texture: When used in baking, lard can improve the texture of some foods, such as pie crusts and biscuits, resulting in flaky crusts and tender dough.

Biscuits and pastry are made with “shortening “. The fat is rubbed into the flour. The molecules of fat surround the flour particles and exclude water. This prevents the development of gluten in the dough.

Biscuit Recipe

Add the butter or the shortening and pulse the food processor several times to cut the fat into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse meal. You can also do this by hand with a pastry blender. The faster you do this the better, you want the fat to remain cold.

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

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.

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.

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

Lard. As noted earlier, vegetable shortening is closest in structure to lard, just without the animal products. If you're baking something savory like biscuits, lard makes a particularly great substitute for shortening.

Most biscuit recipes will tell you to fold or stack the dough in on itself once or twice, rolling it out in between stacking. If your favorite recipe isn't yielding the height that you'd like to see, consider adding an extra fold or two, which will create more layers.

How thick should biscuit dough be? ›

It should be a fairly wet dough. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and pat it into a circle about 1/2-inch thick. Do NOT roll the dough. This will over work the gluten in the biscuit and make it tough.

Milk is used in many baking recipes, including custards, cookies, cakes and breads. Milk encourages the browning reactions characteristic of baked goods like pastry crusts, cookies and biscuits. Milk contributes to the keeping quality of bread and gives it a soft crust.

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.

If your biscuits are floury and grainy…

While over-handling your biscuit dough can make your baked goods turn out like hockey pucks, under-mixing it while you're still adding all of your ingredients can result in floury or grainy biscuits.

Pie Crusts, Flaky Pastry and Biscuits

That's from the overdevelopment of gluten. The butter in the dough helps to create the light, flaky texture desired in these pastries. As the dough is baked, the butter melts and creates steam, trapping it in the dough and creating air pockets.

Fat—butter and shortening in this recipe—creates the tender texture of biscuits and helps form the flaky layers. Butter delivers rich flavor. But because shortening contains no water, it creates more-distinct layers, which is why our Test Kitchen uses a combination of the two.

In general, with baking you want to use unsalted butter so that you can control the amount of salt in your final product. I tend to follow this rule, but I did notice that even the biscuit recipe that I liked the best only called for a small amount of salt.

Use good butter and dairy

Because biscuit recipes call for so few ingredients, it's important that every one is high quality—you'll really taste the difference. Catherine recommends splurging a bit on a grass-fed butter or European-style butter (now's the time to reach for Kerrygold!).