Easy Butter Swim Biscuits Recipe - 100K Recipes (2024)

FAQs

Are biscuits better made with butter or Crisco? ›

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

Handle the dough as little as possible. Every time you touch, knead and fold, you are developing gluten. The more developed the gluten, the tougher the biscuit. Our recipe asks you to the dough 10 times; this will create a cohesive dough with visible pieces of butter and sprinkles of flour.

Increasing the amount of butter definitely makes the biscuit "taste" softer, more crumbly, and more flaky. I usually associate flakiness and softness with size; you expect a big biscuit to be fluffy and soft, and a biscuit that doesn't rise to be dense.

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.

Buttermilk adds a nice tang to the biscuit flavor and helps them rise better.

In general, you can substitute Crisco shortening for butter or margarine in equal amounts (1 cup Crisco shortening = 1 cup butter or margarine). Not only does Crisco shortening have 50% less saturated fat than butter and 0g trans fat per serving, it gives you higher, lighter-textured baked goods.

For super light, crumbly biscuits try grating or pushing the yolks of hard-boiled eggs through a sieve into the biscuit dough. This increases the fat content and slows down the development of gluten. Cookie recipes on the other hand are more likely to contain eggs. Adding moisture as well as binding the mixture.

Pillai became known in India as the 'Biscuit King' or 'Biscuit Baron'. He took over Nabisco's other Asian subsidiaries. Pillai then established links with Boussois-Souchon-Neuvesel (BSN), the French food company, and by 1989 controlled six Asian companies worth over US$400 million.

Strains of soft winter wheat have less protein than the hard spring wheat and therefore southern all-purpose flours are better-suited for quick breads such as biscuits, cakes and muffins.

The Takeaway

That said, if you're looking for a way to up your biscuit game, look for the highest butterfat percentage butter you can find — Nellie's is a great option, but different grocery stores may have different products available.

How can I get my biscuits to rise higher? ›

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.

Once the biscuits are cut and on the cookie sheet, I brush the tops with melted butter before and after baking. If you have never made biscuits from scratch before, you need to know that biscuit dough is one of those doughs that “feels right” when you are kneading it or rolling it out.

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."

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.

That really comes down to your preference. Both buttermilk and heavy cream have their benefits, so the ultimate decision in choosing the "best" ingredient for biscuits comes down to what you enjoy most. No matter which one you use, your biscuits are sure to be the star of any meal.

Homemade biscuits call for just six ingredients: all-purpose flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, butter, and milk. And then more butter once they're finished baking because of course we need more butter.

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.

Cookies made with butter are usually crispier than chewy cookies made with shortening, but the flavor is richer with butter. So a one-to-one butter swap will work great if you need a shortening substitute for cookies. In cakes and breads, the substitution is rarely noticeable when using shortening vs.

Shortening is more effective at reducing gluten formation in doughs. Indeed, this is where the name comes from — it “shortens” gluten strands. It also has a higher melting point than butter, making it less likely to smear into biscuit dough, even if you use your hands to mix it.