Make Ahead Biscuits Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Can homemade biscuits be made ahead? ›

These biscuits are just as good as if you just cut them out and baked them fresh. Make a few batches of these biscuits on a rainy weekend, freeze them, and you'll have fresh biscuits any time you need them. Bake one or two at a time or a dozen—it's up to you.

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.

Yes, it's true! You can freeze scratch-made biscuit dough for a rainy day. After cutting out your biscuits, arrange them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Cover the baking sheet with plastic wrap and then transfer it to your freezer.

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.

Place the dough rounds on a parchment paper-lined sheet pan and cover the entire thing with plastic wrap. When you're ready to bake them the next morning, preheat the oven and pop them in for about 12-15 minutes! I hope you give these overnight buttermilk biscuits a try and let me know how you enjoy them.

The best flour for making biscuits is White Lily flour. It's not available everywhere, so the next best thing is King Arthur All Purpose flour. White lily, self rising. I use it for everything except those thing I make using either cake flour or yeast.

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.

Most biscuits freeze well. Completely cool baked biscuits, scones and shortcakes on a wire rack before wrapping and freezing. To protect flavor and prevent the baked products from drying out, wrap tightly in heavy duty aluminum foil or freezer wrap, or pack in freezer bags.

Open the can, separate the raw biscuits, and lay them out on a baking sheet (don't let them touch each other or they will stick together) and freeze. Once frozen, transfer the biscuits to air-tight freezer bags and store them in the freezer.

When ready to bake frozen biscuits, don't worry about thawing. This is the real miracle of the recipe. Take the frozen biscuits straight from the freezer to the baking tray and bake. Keep in mind that they will take three to five minutes longer to bake depending on how many you bake off at a time.

What do you brush biscuits before baking? ›

Brushing breads and biscuits before they go into the oven with some sort of fat (or egg, or dairy) is a nice way to add color and flavor, but we often seem to default to butter and olive oil when it comes to fat.

The cold chunks of butter are important because as they melt into the biscuit while baking they create tiny pockets of steam that puffs and lifts the dough. These pockets turn into that beautiful light and flaky texture we crave with biscuits.

Bake them close to each other.

Biscuits are an exception to this rule: Placing them close to one another on your baking sheet actually helps them push each other up, as they impede each other from spreading outward and instead puff up skywards.

The dough is easy to make and can be made a day in advance. Wrap the dough discs tightly in food wrap and store in the fridge overnight. Remove the dough from the fridge about 20 minutes before you want to roll it and leave it on the worktop to soften slightly before you roll it out.

Store in the freezer for up to 3 months. To Reheat and Serve: Remove the number of biscuits you plan to serve. Reheat in the microwave until heated throughout, about 30 seconds.

When you place the dough in the refrigerator, it can stay overnight. In fact, the longer it sits in the fridge, the better. So you can easily make the dough the night before and bake the buttermilk biscuits in the morning.

I've heard many even say that the biscuits can lose their leavening by being stored overnight in the fridge. I recently froze and refrigerated a few rounds of biscuit dough. I found that the frozen ones did rise higher, but the refrigerated ones had a nicer shape. They still rose, just not quite as much.