Another big variable in biscuit recipes is the amount of fat (butter, shortening, etc.) that the recipe calls for. Usually its in the ballpark of 1/3 or 1/2 cup per 2 cups of flour, which is about half the amount of fat per flour that you put into a pie crust. But what difference does the fat make? Are biscuits fluffier with more or less fat? Richer? Tastier?
- Batch 1: 1/4 cup of butter (1:8 ratio)
- Batch 2: 1/2 cup of butter (1:4 ratio)
- Batch 3: 1 cup of butter (1:2 ratio)
I then took a time-lapse video of the biscuits as they baked. The pan has two representative biscuits from each batch. Oven temperature is 425 F.
As we saw with the liquid experiment, "drier" biscuits tend to rise more (in this case, the biscuits with less fat tend to rise more). in this case, it appears that the biscuit structure is just a lot more stable (structurally speaking) when there's less butter. When you get a lot of butter, you're kind of filling your biscuit with holes, which makes it unable to bear its own weight to rise very far. So, you definitely get flatter biscuits when you add more butter (incidentally, the same is true with cookies... if your cookies are running all over the pan when they bake, just reduce the amount of butter/shortening and they'll hold their shape much better). But what about taste?
This was a tough one. Increasing the amount of butter definitely makes the biscuit "taste" softer, more crumbly, and more flaky. I usually associate flakiness and softness with size; you expect a big biscuit to be fluffy and soft, and a biscuit that doesn't rise to be dense. But, at least right out of the oven, the super butter biscuits really melt in your mouth. But the biscuits with 1 cup of butter seemed too rich to my wife and I, and I suspect that after cooling down, they would be dense and gross. The biscuit with very little butter wasn't as soft and flaky, but it was more structurally sound.
1/4 cup of butter
1/2 cup of butter
1 cup of butter
Conclusion:None of these biscuits were bad, but again, the middle option seems to be the best choice. A ratio of 1/2 cup of butter to 2 cups of flour (1:4) seems to work pretty well.
