9 Tips for Baking the Best Biscuits Ever
November 2015
Flaky,
buttery, tender homemade biscuits are delicious for breakfast with
butter and preserves or honey. Enjoy a hearty brunch of biscuits with
sausage gravy and fried eggs. Or serve biscuits as cocktail sandwiches,
with thin shavings of ham and a dab of mustard. Sweet or savory, you
just can’t go wrong.
Biscuits
have only a few ingredients and are so simple to make. The way you
handle the dough makes all the difference. Follow these tips for a
foolproof batch of light and flaky biscuits.
•
Always start with well-chilled butter when mixing, and work quickly to
keep it from melting. If the butter starts to soften while you are
cutting it into the dry ingredients, chill the mixture in the freezer
for about 10 minutes before proceeding.
•
Don’t overmix the ingredients — or overwork the dough. Both mistakes
can result in tough biscuits. In fact, the butter should remain in small
pieces (rather than be mixed to the point of creaminess).
•
Bake the biscuits in a hot oven — 400 degrees or higher. This ensures
that the bits of butter melt quickly, creating the steam that lifts the
dough and adds height to the flaky layers.
•
If you plan to serve biscuits to guests in the morning, you can mix the
dry ingredients with the butter and chill overnight, and then add the
buttermilk and mix the dough the next morning.
Southern
chef and cookbook author Scott Peacock is famous for his airy, flaky,
tender buttermilk biscuits. Here are his tips for transcendent biscuits:
Tip 1: Always measure the flour after sifting it, not before.
Tip 2: To
help the biscuits rise to their fullest potential, take care not to
twist the cutter (thus pinching the edges together) when cutting out the
rounds of dough. When you look at them, you can see the layers that
will result in flakiness.
Tip 3: Place the rounds close together on the baking sheet so the sides of the biscuits don’t set early and inhibit rising.
Tip 4: Don’t be afraid of brown biscuits. That crusty exterior provides contrast to the tender, light interior.
Tip 5: To
reheat biscuits, place them on a cooling rack set in a baking sheet,
and then warm them in a 350 degree oven about 5 minutes. Ready to get
rolling? Bake a basketful of our best biscuits.
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