7up Biscuits Recipe | Picture the Recipe (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.

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.

Eggs act as a binder for biscuits, without them the mixture will be far too crumbly. They also add flavour and texture, as well as extending shelf life.

If your biscuits are too tough…

Likewise, the stickiness makes it tempting to over-knead biscuit dough, which will break down the butter into smaller pieces, shrinking the air pockets they will create during baking. The result: Tough, dense biscuits.

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.

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."

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

Heavy Cream.

The heavy cream adds flavor to the biscuit by adding a little more fat and helps hydrate the dough. The extra fat in the heavy cream is helpful because buttermilk in stores is often “low-fat” buttermilk.

Powder has the leavening power to puff all on its own. One other side effect of the additional ingredients in baking powder is that the mix is less concentrated (and thus less powerful) than baking soda. In fact, 1 teaspoon of baking powder has approximately the same leavening power as just ¼ teaspoon baking soda.

Sugar gives sweetness, but it is also important in developing the texture of the biscuit. Dissolved sugar tends to inhibit starch gelatinisation and gluten formation and creates a biscuit with a more tender texture. Undissolved sugar crystals give a crunchy, crisp texture.

What does cream of tartar do in biscuits? ›

As the biscuits rise, the carbon dioxide gas expands, creating pressure on the dough. This pressure can cause the dough to collapse without proper support. Cream of Tartar helps stabilize the dough structure, ensuring the biscuits maintain their shape and rise uniformly.

Egg white has the capability to gel and is frequently used as a binding agent in many different prepared foods. Using more whites in a cake mixture will help create a fluffy, light baked product with good volume and texture; while using more yolks will create a denser baked good with a deeper, richer flavour.

The secret to excellent biscuits is COLD BUTTER. Really cold. Many times the biscuit dough gets worked so much that the butter softens before the biscuits even go in the oven. Try cutting the butter into small pieces and stick back in the fridge pulling out only when ready to incorporate into the dough.

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.

in this case, it appears that the biscuit structure is just a lot more stable (structurally speaking) when there's less butter. When you get a lot of butter, you're kind of filling your biscuit with holes, which makes it unable to bear its own weight to rise very far.

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.

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

While biscuits receive some leavening power from chemical sources — baking powder and baking soda — the difference between serviceable and greatness comes from the extra rise that steam provides. In order to generate steam, the oven must be set at a minimum of 425 degrees for at least 10 minutes prior to baking.

Falling apart

The likelihood here is that your recipe needs a bit more liquid, or your recipe has too high a ratio of flour. Be sparing with any flour you put on the work surface to roll your dough too. Too much will dry it out and cause the cookie to crumble (so to speak).