Quickly mixing the dough with a fork reduces gluten formation, resulting in a tender, soft drop biscuit.
Preparing the butter first and reserving it in the refrigerator keeps it cold to avoid unwanted melting.
Traditional drop biscuits require just five ingredients, but with their buttery, salty flavor, and cloud-like bite, the final result tastes anything but ordinary. While they're simple, there are still nearly endless variations from one coveted family recipe to the next, each with intense loyalties and deep-seated tastes and opinions attached. With my hat off to your time-honored recipes and trustworthy techniques, I'm here today to present my own drop biscuit thoughts and a recipe.
Fannie Farmer, of the famed Boston Cooking School, called drop biscuits "emergency biscuits," which is incredibly appropriate considering that all you need to make them is about 25 minutes and a minimally stocked pantry. In fact, because of their speedy nature, they are a valued go-to item even for professional bakers and chefs.
Two Ways to Mix Drop Biscuits
To make them, I start by cutting the butter into lima bean–sized pieces and reserving it in the refrigerator to keep it nice and cold. After mixing my dry ingredients together (flour, salt, and baking powder), I add the butter and work it quickly with my hands, rubbing the butter into the flour just enough. Over-mix, and the result is tough; under-mix, and the result is dry, not tender.
This step can also be done in afood processor, requiring just a few short pulses. Much as when making a scone (which is essentially a biscuit with more sugar and an egg), you want to keep pieces of solid, visible butter in there to give you a tender, rather than dry or chewy, final drop biscuit.
The food processor is a great option when you're working with really large batches of dough, or if you're working in a particularly warm environment. Otherwise, rubbing in the butter by hand gives you more control over the mixing. It also means fewer dishes, which is always a big plus in my world.
After that, I carefully mix in the liquid with a fork to create a dough that's shaggy and moist. The beauty of the drop biscuit is that it requires much less handling than itssuper-flaky cousin, so there's much less risk of overworking the dough and developing too much gluten.
A Simple Ingredients List is Best
Some recipes call for buttermilk, others for milk; since I tend to have whole milk on hand more often, I stay in line with Fannie's "emergency biscuit" philosophy and use a milk-based approach. After all, part of the advantage of these biscuits is how easy they are to throw together with ingredients that most of us have available all the time.
Unlike some recipes,my drop biscuits donotinclude an egg. Although I played around with several variations using egg, it always seemed to make a drop biscuit that was overly spongy and cake-like, rather than soft and tender.
I also experimented with different ratios of heavy cream to milk, but the higher fat content from the cream, although delicious, created a denser final product. In the end, the simple, five-ingredients formula—butter, flour, baking powder, salt, and milk—yielded the best results.
1 teaspoon (4g) Diamond Crystal kosher salt; for table salt use half as much by volume or the same weight
4ounces cold unsalted butter (1 stick; 115g), cut into 1/4-inch cubes and refrigerated
3/4cup (180ml) whole milk
Directions
Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper; alternatively, grease the baking sheet with butter.
In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt.
Toss butter into dry ingredients until coated with flour. Working quickly, using your fingers or a pastry blender, rub or cut butter into flour until it resembles coarse meal. Alternatively, add flour mixture and butter to the bowl of a food processor and pulse 2 to 3 times to form pea-sized pieces; transfer to a large bowl.
Add milk and stir with a fork until the mixture just comes together into a slightly sticky, shaggy dough.
For small biscuits, use a teaspoon or a small cookie scoop to mound walnut-sized balls of dough onto prepared baking sheet. For large biscuits, use a 1/4-cup measuring cup to mound balls of dough onto prepared baking sheet.
Bake biscuits until golden brown, about 15 minutes for small biscuits and 20 minutes for large ones. Let cool slightly, then transfer to a wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Special Equipment
Food processor (optional), rimmed baking sheet and wire cooling rack
Drop biscuits have more milk or other liquid added to the dough than rolled biscuits. The dough is moister and cannot be kneaded or rolled; simply drop tablespoons of dough onto the baking sheet. Drop biscuits don't rise as much as other biscuits and they are always coarser in appearance and texture.
Fat aside, a common solution to crumbly biscuits is to cut back on the measured amount of dry ingredients. According to Quaker, you should be scooping flour gently with a spoon instead of sticking your measuring cup directly into the bag, which can lead to compacted mis-measurements.
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.
He asked if I remembered Quaaludes, a sedative-hypnotic that was all the rage in the 1960s and '70s. “We called them 'Stumble Biscuits,'” he told me, “because you'd stumble down the street and hit one car and then stumble over and hit something else and it was just happy and goofy.
Biscuits, soda breads, cornbread, and similar breads are all considered quick breads, meaning that they do not need time for the dough to rise before baking.
The writer described them as "a kind of sugared biscuit, which are wrapped up, generally two of them together, in a sheet of wax paper, sealed with black wax." The biscuits were given to each person attending the funeral, and were a custom of the funerals of "lower and the middling class of people." In Lincolnshire, ...
Overworking the dough will not only create a tough biscuit instead of a tender biscuit, but can also result in a flatter biscuit. The more you play with the dough, the warmer the dough becomes. If the fat becomes too warm it will melt into the flour and they won't rise as tall.
Heavy cream provides rich butterfat that gives the biscuits tenderness and flavor, as well as moisture from its water content. The formula requires minimal mixing, reducing the risk of too much gluten development.
It's super simple and makes tall, fluffy biscuits ready for breakfast, sandwiches, and more! 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!).
Place the pan of biscuits in the refrigerator while you preheat your oven to 425°F, or for about 20 to 30 minutes. This short chill will help the biscuits maintain their shape while baking.
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.
Because biscuit recipes call for so few ingredients, it's important that every one is high quality—you'll really taste the difference. Catherine recommends splurging a bit on a grass-fed butter or European-style butter (now's the time to reach for Kerrygold!).
In general, with baking you want to use unsalted butter so that you can control the amount of salt in your final product. I tend to follow this rule, but I did notice that even the biscuit recipe that I liked the best only called for a small amount of salt.
While many bowhunters who only use drop-away rests tout their products' superior speed and accuracy, field tests have indicated the difference between Whisker Biscuits and drop-aways is minimal to negligible for most hunting scenarios, losing just a few feet per second and about an inch of drop at longer distances.
Drop biscuits have a dense, crusty, and crumbly consistency, whereas roll-and-cut biscuits are light, fluffy, and flaky. Since roll-and-cut biscuits hold their shape better and have a fluffier crumb, they'd work best for biscuit sandwiches and as a flaky topping for pot pies or casseroles.
A biscuit, in most English speaking countries, is a flour-based baked and shaped food item. Biscuits are typically hard, flat, and unleavened. They are usually sweet and may be made with sugar, chocolate, icing, jam, ginger, or cinnamon. They can also be savoury, similar to crackers.
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