Amish Fluffy Homemade Biscuits Recipe - Amish Heritage (2024)

FAQs

Why are my homemade biscuits not fluffy? ›

The key to making great biscuits is to use cold butter. We dice up the butter and then refrigerate it until ready to use. Cold butter will produce the fluffiest layers in your biscuits. Do not over-mix – once liquids touch the flour, mix just until dry ingredients are moistened.

When you fold the dough, these pieces of butter stack on top of each other, creating rough layers of butter and dough that translate to flakiness once baked. Buttermilk Biscuits get maximum flakiness from a folding step built into the recipe.

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.

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.

Embrace stacking. In biscuit-making, height and flakiness go hand in hand. Why? Because the layers of butter that get compressed and stacked as you build your biscuits are what create those flakey biscuit bits, and they also create steam in the oven — which helps the biscuits to expand as tall as possible.

Each time you cut and push the dough, the resulting biscuits are less likely to rise and be fluffy. By the third or fourth time, the biscuits will not rise as high as the first two rounds. The small amount of leftover dough after that can be fun for children (or fun adults) to play with.

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).

How many times should you fold biscuit dough? ›

Rolling the Dough Out Once

You can't roll out your dough only once for layers and layers of buttery goodness. For flaky layers, fold and roll the dough five times before cutting.

Baking Powder and Baking Soda: We use 5 teaspoons of baking powder in this biscuit recipe. I know that seems like a lot, but trust me. The extra baking powder makes our biscuits fluffy and tender, and baking soda helps them brown nicely.

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.

The stronger the bond, the tougher the crust and vice versa. Lard also has a higher melting point than butter, melting between 109 and 118° F while butter melts somewhere between 90 and 95° F. A slower render means more air and steam-release, which means more leavening and flakiness.

If the fat melts or softens before the biscuits bake, the biscuits will be hard and flat because there's no place for the CO2 to go except out of the biscuits. Don't work in a hot kitchen. If the dough seems to be getting too soft or warm, place it in the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes.

If your freshly baked biscuits seem too soft after they're cooled, then they're either under baked, or there is too much liquid in the recipe.

All Butter Dough

The cold chunks of butter are important because as they melt into the biscuit while baking they create tiny pockets of steam that puffs and lifts the dough. These pockets turn into that beautiful light and flaky texture we crave with biscuits.

Difference Between Flaky & Fluffy Biscuits

Fluffy biscuits are tall, soft, and almost cake-like in texture. They're made by incorporating more liquid into the dough, which creates more steam and makes the biscuits rise higher. Flaky biscuits, on the other hand, are shorter and have a more crumbly exterior.