Jo Rooney's Buttermilk Biscuits Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Should you use butter or Crisco in biscuits? ›

Crisco may be beneficial for other baking applications, but for biscuit making, butter is the ultimate champion!

A non-fluffy, flat biscuit can be caused by a few things: too much liquid in the dough (resist the urge to add more buttermilk to make the dough come together and use the heat of your hands and a bit more kneading instead). Over-mixing the dough can cause flat biscuits.

What's the Difference Between Buttermilk Biscuits and Regular Biscuits? As the names might suggest, regular biscuits do not contain buttermilk, while these do. Regular biscuits are typically prepared with milk or water instead. Buttermilk adds a nice tang to the biscuit flavor and helps them rise better.

The extra fat in the heavy cream is helpful because buttermilk in stores is often “low-fat” buttermilk. Buttermilk. The buttermilk adds a tangy flavor to the biscuit and helps hydrate the dough just enough to create a nice structure for our biscuits.

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 secret to the best biscuits is using very cold butter and baking powder. We've made a lot of biscuits, but this easy biscuits recipe is the one we turn to the most (they are so fluffy!). See our easy drop biscuits and cheese drop biscuits for even easier biscuits.

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."

Keep the oven hot.

When baking buttery treats like biscuits, the key is to bake them at a temperature where the water in the butter turns quickly to steam. This steam is a big part of how the biscuits achieve their height, as it evaporates up and out.

They're More Tender

Back to that gluten—it's responsible for giving baked goods their chew, so the lower gluten content of flour made from soft red winter wheat means that biscuits made with it are more tender than those made with other flours that aren't.

To replace 1 cup (240 mL) of buttermilk in a recipe, combine 3/4 cup (172 grams) of sour cream with 1/4 cup (60 mL) of water or milk, and whisk the mixture until smooth.

What do the British call buttermilk biscuits? ›

A Biscuit (U.S.) Is a Scone (U.K.)

The closest British equivalent to those buttery miracles is a scone, which ain't too bad either. Both baked goodies use flour, fat, liquid and a leavening agent.

Vegetable Oils (Palm, Rapeseed, Water, Salt, Flavourings), Sweetener: Maltitol, Oats (19%), Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Cornflour, Rice Flour, Raising Agent: Sodium Bicarbonate; Skimmed Milk Powder. May also contain Nuts, Soya and Eggs.

High-fat butter, such as Kerrygold Butter, is best. The rich fat from the butter releases water when the biscuits are baking which is what contributes to the beautiful layers and flakiness that we love about biscuits.

A slower render means more air and steam-release, which means more leavening and flakiness. The fat crystals in lard are also larger than those in butter, which means there is more empty space left behind when the fat renders out -- more space also means more layers and flakes.

Nutrition. Some say butter is not the healthiest choice when cooking, but compared to shortening, it packs way more nutrition value. Harvard Public Health even states that fats are crucial to our health, and butter is more of a natural and heart-healthy ingredient overall.

It might change the texture slightly as shortening is 100 percent fat, but butter and margarine are composed of about 85 percent fat and 15 percent water. The taste of butter is usually richer and more complex, though, so it'll even out for the best!