Angel Biscuits Recipe - The Cookie Rookie® (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to biscuits? ›

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.

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.

Be sure to keep that oven door closed! Opening your oven door during the baking process will let all that heat out. That rush of cold air that you let in can cause your biscuits to not rise as much. If you really want to keep an eye on your biscuits while they bake, turn the oven light on and peek from the outside.

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.

Biscuit recipes tend to be egg-free, this makes them drier and the lack of protein to bind the mix helps achieve that crumbly texture. For super light, crumbly biscuits try grating or pushing the yolks of hard-boiled eggs through a sieve into the biscuit dough.

Buttermilk adds a tangy flavor to the biscuits and makes them slightly more tender. Butter: We use salted European butter in this recipe. It will work with unsalted or salted butter. I like the extra saltiness of salted butter, but you can reduce the salt to 3/4 teaspoon if you prefer.

If you start asking around, any Southern chef, Southern Living Test Kitchen pro, or biscuit-making family member will swear by White Lily flour. Generations of bakers have claimed it as the secret to the perfect, flaky biscuit.

The butter version rises the highest — look at those flaky layers! The shortening biscuit is slightly shorter and a bit drier, too. Butter contains a bit of water, which helps create steam and gives baked goods a boost.

Yes. If you sift flour, it becomes aerated and less dense. “A cup of flour sifted before measuring will weigh 20 to 30 percent less than a cup of flour sifted after measuring — a difference that can make a huge impact on the texture of finished baked goods,” Cook's Illustrated says.

Biscuits are a type of quick bread (because they require no rising time before baking) with their moon in pastry. Like pastry dough, biscuits get their tender crumb and layers from the suspension of fat in flour.

What temperature should you cook biscuits at? ›

Bake at 400° for 10-12 minutes or until golden and cooked through. Remove from pan and cool on wire racks. Store biscuits at room temperature for 1-2 days, or for best results, wrap in plastic wrap and freeze leftover biscuits in an airtight container for up to 3 months.

Too Much Flour

Our cookies didn't expand much from the rolled-up balls we put on the baking sheet. They also didn't brown as well as the other cookies. It doesn't take much—in this case, my mom and I added just 3/4 cup extra flour to the dough. The cookies tasted good, but were dry and definitely crumbly.

Cover the dough loosely with a kitchen towel and allow it to rest for 30 minutes. Gently pat out the dough some more, so that the rectangle is roughly 10 inches by 6 inches. Cut dough into biscuits using a floured biscuit cutter (or even a glass, though its duller edge may result in slightly less tall biscuits).

Cut dough into 8 even squares with the bench knife. Cut off uneven edges and put these scraps to the side; clean cuts on all sides will encourage rise.

Properly made shortening biscuits are soft and crumbly, with a slightly more cake-like crumb than butter biscuits. They often don't have quite the same dramatic rise as butter biscuits — there's none of that extra buttery steam to help add lift.

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. When the biscuits hit the oven, the cold liquid will start to evaporate creating steam which will help our biscuits get very tall.