Kitchen Experiments: What Flour Makes The Best Biscuits? (2024)

FAQs

Kitchen Experiments: What Flour Makes The Best Biscuits? ›

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.

Strains of soft winter wheat have less protein than the hard spring wheat and therefore southern all-purpose flours are better-suited for quick breads such as biscuits, cakes and muffins.

Plain flour is an all-purpose flour with a lower protein and gluten content. This makes the flour softer and ideal for cakes, pastries, thickening sauces, and biscuits.

Flour provides the structure in baked goods. Wheat flour contains proteins that interact with each other when mixed with water, forming gluten. It is this elastic gluten framework which stretches to contain the expanding leavening gases during rising. The protein content of a flour affects the strength of a dough.

As White Lily flour hydrates, the gluten development will never reach the full potential of brands like Gold Medal or King Arthur. The result is a lighter, fluffier biscuit with a greater rise.

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.

Unlike plain flour, self-rising flour already comes pre-mixed with a fixed distribution of salt and a raising agent out of the box. Generally, self-rising flour also has a lower protein content, so it's often used in recipes that benefit from being lighter and more tender, like biscuits.

The gluten formed from the use of pastry flour yields a flaky biscuit with just the right amount of structure.

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.

What makes biscuits fall apart? ›

When the fat is cut too small, after baking there will be more, smaller air pockets left by the melting fat. The result is a baked product that crumbles. When cutting in shortening and other solid fats, cut only until the pieces of shortening are 1/8- to 1/4-inch in size.

Sugar and Salt: Add flavor. We don't add a lot of sugar (just 1 tablespoon). Cold Butter: I love using European-style salted butter, like Kerrygold or Plugra, since they make our biscuits tender and delicious. If you don't have European salted butter, plain butter works (salted or unsalted).

Cake flour will give you a lighter, fluffier biscuit, but the outer crust won't have as much bite to it. Conversely, all-purpose flour will provide more bite, but it'll be a drier, less airy biscuit. The solution: Use half cake flour and half all-purpose flour.

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.

Bicarbonate of soda is sodium hydrogen carbonate, chemical formula NaHCO3. When this is added to the hot butter and syrup mixture it decomposes, producing carbon dioxide, water and sodium carbonate. You can see the gas being produced as the mixture foams and produces lots of bubbles.

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.

Self-Rising Flour: Flour to which baking powder and salt have been added during milling. Long a Southern staple, self-rising flour is generally made from the low-protein wheat traditionally grown in the South. It's best for tender biscuits, muffins, pancakes and some cakes.

Baking at a Low Temperature

A hot oven helps biscuits bake—and rise—quickly. We recommend 475˚F for 15 minutes. Remove them from the oven as soon as they are lightly brown.

Here's our Test Kitchen's simple method to make self-rising flour: For every cup of self-rising flour, substitute one cup of all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon baking soda.