Our Favorite Fluffy Biscuits

These are the most tender and fluffy homemade biscuits we’ve ever made. Our recipe calls for flour, butter, baking powder, and milk. These biscuits are big, tall, tender, and delicious. Jump to the Homemade Biscuits Recipe

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What is The Secret For The Best Homemade Biscuits?

We’ve made a lot of biscuits. Here are the two things we’ve found to make the best biscuits: cold butter and baking powder.

In this homestyle biscuit recipe, we cut very cold butter into all-purpose flour, salt, and baking powder. The butter makes these biscuits taste incredible. It also helps to make the crumb light, airy, and tender.

For these particular biscuits, we choose to mix baking powder and flour ourselves instead of buying self-rising flour. Self-rising flour is pre-mixed flour, baking powder, and salt. There’s nothing wrong with it, and when you use the right recipe, it cuts down on adding extra ingredients.

In this case, though, we add more baking powder than usual. If you use self-rising flour, there won’t be enough baking powder added to the biscuit dough. So, if self-rising flour is all you have, use it, but whisk in 2 extra teaspoons of baking powder.

I know that seems like a lot of baking powder, but trust me. The extra baking powder in this biscuit recipe is a game-changer for making the fluffiest and most tender homemade biscuits.

More: If you love biscuits, please take a look at these Cranberry Scones or these Blackberry Lemon Scones. The dough for scones is similar to biscuits!

How to Make Biscuits

You have two options for making these. My preferred method is to get out my food processor. It’s an excellent tool for cutting the cold butter into our flour mixture since it’s quick. We use it to make our favorite All-Butter Pie Crust for the same reason. When cutting the butter into the flour, you want to be as fast as possible so that the butter does not warm up.

If you don’t feel like getting your food processor out, you can use your hands or a pastry cutter to work the butter into the flour — we do this when making our easy Drop Biscuits and these Cheese Biscuits.

Tip: If your butter starts to warm up, place the bowl with flour and butter into the fridge for 5 to 10 minutes.

When the butter and flour are dealt with, we mix in the milk and then form the dough. Pretty simple.

We don’t use a rolling pin when preparing the biscuits. Instead, we press the dough with our fingers. You can see us work the dough in our video.

First, we push the dough into a rough rectangle and then fold the sides into the middle, like a letter. Then we rotate the new rectangle, press it out, and do it again.

If the dough needs it, we will do it for a third time before pressing it into a final rectangle and cutting out our biscuits. If any of that seems confusing, please watch our video. I promise it isn’t difficult.

Frequently Asked Questions

What type of flour is best for making biscuits? We use all-purpose flour since that’s what is available where we live. However, some stores sell soft white wheat flour (lower protein), like White Lilly, Martha White, and Bob’s Red Mill Fine Pastry Flour. These are all excellent options for biscuits since their lower protein content shuts down gluten formation, which means they will be light, fluffy, and tender. I should note, though, that with this biscuit recipe, all-purpose flour is perfectly adequate. Thanks to the extra baking powder, the biscuits are light and fluffy no matter what flour you use.

What type of butter is best for making biscuits? Most often, in our baking recipes, we call for unsalted butter. In this recipe, though, I love reaching for European salted butter, like Kerrygold or Plugra, since they make the biscuits tender and delicious. Now, if you don’t have European salted butter on hand, plain butter works (salted or unsalted). I love the slightly more salty flavor when salted butter is used in our recipe, but you can always hold back on some of the salt called for in the recipe if you aren’t looking for more savory/salty biscuits.