Unbelievable Gluten Free Drop Biscuits 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.

Fat aside, a common solution to crumbly biscuits is to cut back on the measured amount of dry ingredients. According to Quaker, you should be scooping flour gently with a spoon instead of sticking your measuring cup directly into the bag, which can lead to compacted mis-measurements.

Moisture content: If you have too much or too little liquid, then your biscuits will either not rise or be very dense. You want a sticky dough that holds its shape when pressed. Sour cream with just a bit of extra milk provides the perfect moisture for gluten free biscuits!

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.

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.

Drop biscuits have more milk or other liquid added to the dough than rolled biscuits. The dough is moister and cannot be kneaded or rolled; simply drop tablespoons of dough onto the baking sheet. Drop biscuits don't rise as much as other biscuits and they are always coarser in appearance and texture.

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.

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.

Why won't my gluten free dough rise? ›

If your gluten free bread didn't rise, here are some things to check: Was the yeast expired? Did you use the right type of yeast that the recipe called for? (Active dry yeast or Rapid-rise yeast.) What temperature was the water you proofed the yeast in?

Gluten-free flour is not a perfect substitute for wheat flour. Each mixture out there is designed to mostly work in certain kinds of recipe, but not in all of them. And yes, it is perfectly normal for a gluten-free cookie to be crumbly, since it is the gluten itself that holds wheat cookes together.

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.

A little bit more rustic than their rolled cousins, drop biscuits are made by 'dropping' a spoonful of moist dough onto a baking sheet, rather than rolling them out and shaping them carefully with a cutter. Drop biscuits contain more liquid than rolled ones and don't tend to rise as high as other biscuits.

Use very cold butter.

When the biscuits go in the oven, the butter will melt and cause steam. This buttery steam, in turn, helps produce flaky layers and a higher lift to the biscuits.

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.

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.

Basically, you pat the dough out into a rectangle, then fold it up into thirds (like you're folding a letter to put in an envelope), then repeat that process. This trick applies to scones too. This step ensures your biscuits will bake up tall, with distinct layers of flaky goodness.

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.