Buttermilk Drop Biscuits With Garlic and Cheddar Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why do you put buttermilk instead of milk in biscuits? ›

“Buttermilk is acidic and reacts with the alkaline baking soda to add more loft when the oven's heat hits the dough,” says Prep Kitchen Manager Catherine Ward. That means your scratch-made biscuits and cakes will rise higher and have a lighter texture. And let's not forget that buttermilk adds flavor.

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.

Secret to Fluffy Biscuits #2: Use cold liquids

Just like you should use cold butter, you also want to make sure your liquids that you add are also cold. Whether that's heavy cream, milk or buttermilk just make sure they are cold as well. This way the liquid wouldn't warm up the butter too much.

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.

Selecting the liquid for your 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.

This quick and easy buttermilk substitute is incredibly simple, and my hope is that you have what you need at home already. Here's what you need: Lemon juice OR vinegar. Fresh or bottled lemon juice OR distilled white vinegar will work equally well.

Yes, you can substitute sour cream! Thin it with milk or water to get the right consistency. For each cup of buttermilk needed, use 3/4 cup sour cream and 1/4 cup liquid. Editor's Tip: Sour cream has a higher fat content, so this will result in richer-tasting foods.

If you are going to substitute a non-cultured liquid into your biscuits, I'd strongly recommend using low-fat milk, or even whole milk, instead of cream. Both will give you a more pleasant biscuit, with just the right amount of fat that you'll still want to slather the inside with butter.

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

Use Cold Butter for Biscuits

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. We default to our Land O Lakes® Salted Butter when baking biscuits.

What kind of flour do southerners use for biscuits? ›

Besides being passed down by beloved grandmothers, Southern biscuits are typically made with flour made from soft red winter wheat, such as White Lily.

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.

Bon Appétit explains how it boils down to a difference in protein levels between hard and soft flour: Hard flour, which is more common in the North, contains more protein than soft flour, which is more difficult to find outside of the South.

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.

Heavy cream is a great substitute for milk in a baking recipe, but it does need to be diluted slightly. Because heavy cream boasts a fat content of 36% to 40%, using a half cup of heavy cream mixed with a half cup of water will be your best bet for replacing one cup of milk.

Buttermilk has more acid than regular milk, which will reduce the carbon dioxide released and thwart the leavening process important to these recipes. To achieve the desired result when using buttermilk instead of milk, be sure to substitute baking soda for some or all for of the baking powder.

The acid in buttermilk is the key to its superpowers in the kitchen. In baking, it reacts with the alkaline baking soda to produce carbon dioxide, helping your baked goods puff up, giving you an airier final product (like in these cornmeal and buttermilk pancakes).

If your biscuits are too dry…

Dry biscuits that stick to the roof of your mouth make for an unpleasant eating experience that will have you gulping your coffee or OJ just to get through it — and they're often the result of having spent too long in the oven.

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).