Recipe: Herbed Yogurt Biscuits (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.

Increasing the amount of butter definitely makes the biscuit "taste" softer, more crumbly, and more flaky.

With baking, if a recipe specifically calls for Greek yogurt, the added moisture from using regular yogurt instead might make the dough or batter too wet. Some recipes are more forgiving. For example, a salad dressing might be slightly looser, but work out just fine when made with regular yogurt.

White wheat in general is around 9-12% protein, while the hard reds are 11-15%. As far as brands of flour, White Lily “all-purpose” flour has been my go-to for biscuit making. It's a soft red winter wheat, and the low protein and low gluten content keep biscuits from becoming too dense.

It's no shock that four of the top five most popular yogurt flavors over the last three years have been classic fruit: strawberry, blueberry, peach, and raspberry.

Greek yogurt is made by straining out the extra whey in regular yogurt, which makes the yogurt thicker, creamier and tangier than regular yogurt. While plain Greek yogurt has less sugar and more protein than regular yogurt, the latter delivers almost twice the bone-strengthening mineral calcium.

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

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.

What type of butter is best for biscuits? ›

Make sure your butter is at the correct temperature – use unsalted butter softened to room temperature for creaming and cold, unsalted butter for biscuits and pastries that require butter to be rubbed into the flour.

Sour cream will give you a similar texture and tanginess, and swapping sour cream for yogurt is a simple 1-to-1 ratio. Where it gets tricky is if you're using a fat-free variety: In that case, the substitution only works for cold recipes, like dips.

Full-fat plain yogurt has a thinner texture because not all the whey has been removed. It is best for salad dressings, marinades and baking.

Applesauce is a great substitute for yogurt. Although it may slightly alter the taste and texture of the final product, applesauce adds moisture and helps bind the ingredients together. For substitution, use an equal amount of applesauce for yogurt.

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.

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.

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.

But if you chill your pan of biscuits in the fridge before baking, not only will the gluten relax (yielding more tender biscuits), the butter will harden up. 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.