Easy Sourdough Biscuits Recipe - Tender Homemade Biscuits! (2024)

FAQs

What ingredient makes biscuits more tender when added? ›

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 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.

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.

With biscuits, however, the goal is to avoid this chewiness. So, by adding hard-boiled egg yolk to a biscuit recipe, you'll thwart the formation of gluten, thereby resulting in a buttery, flakey crumb that'll dissolve in your mouth.

Sugar is used in biscuit formulations in a granulated or powder form. Sugar gives sweetness, but it is also important in developing the texture of the biscuit. Dissolved sugar tends to inhibit starch gelatinisation and gluten formation and creates a biscuit with a more tender texture.

White wheat in general is around 9-12% protein, while the hard reds are 11-15%. As far as brands of flour, White Lily “all-purpose” flour has been my go-to for biscuit making. It's a soft red winter wheat, and the low protein and low gluten content keep biscuits from becoming too dense.

Buttermilk adds a tangy flavor to the biscuits and makes them slightly more tender.

The bread flour is necessary because, for flaky layers, you need more gluten, or protein, in the biscuits. Some shortening is used for more tender biscuits; since these biscuits are handled more, they need a different fat combination to make sure they aren't tough. Bread flour biscuits require an especially light hand.

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.

What is the king of biscuit? ›

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.

SouthernKitchen.com says, "Ask any Southern chef or sagacious biscuit grandma and you'll hear a pattern emerge: they all swear by White Lily flour."

Cream of Tartar is undoubtedly a key ingredient in biscuits, providing essential leavening action, texture enhancement, and stability. Its ability to balance acidity, preserve freshness, and adapt to various biscuit variations makes it a staple in the baker's pantry.

Adding eggs to a dough makes it softer and richer,more like challah or sandwich bread. There's nothing wrong with that, and you can certainly roll it out and make a flatbread with it, but it won't have the chew of a good pizza dough, and the bottom won't get as crisp. It will be something other than pizza.

The Perfect Finishing Touch. Egg washes are used to brush on pastries, breads, pie crusts, biscuits, scones and more before baking them so they bake up with a beautiful, bright, golden brown finish.

Fully incorporating the butter and flour guarantees tender, airy biscuits every time. Low-protein flours keep biscuits fluffy and light, never tough. Yogurt provides both hydration and structure, for biscuits that bake up straight and tall but moist.

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.

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

Choosing between shortening and lard comes down to personal preference. Both create a flaky, tender crust, are semi-solid, and are 100% fat. Swap one for the other in recipes. If you want to add additional flavor to the dish, lard is the right choice.