How to Make the Absolute Easiest Ever Biscuits

[Music] the world of biscuits all stems back to the classic which takes cold butter that you cut into flour then you add enough buttermilk to make a dough roll that out and stamp it now people have simplified this recipe over the years to include the drop biscuit which is the same but you add more liquid so that the dough is scoopable rather than stampable or this one is the cream biscuit where cream is substituted for the butter and the buttermilk and again it makes a biscuit you can stamp out and roll but today dan has an entirely new method that he claims is even better so julia this recipe is groundbreaking and i don't normally say that right off the bat we wanted the easiest ever biscuit right and both of those styles the drop and the cream offer something really great the drop biscuit you just drop it onto the sheet there's no rolling and cutting and the cream biscuit is just a simple ingredient list so we wanted to combine both of those we wanted a drop cream biscuit which we've kind of nicknamed the dream biscuit oh i like it right and it is an absolute dream so we're going to start with our dry ingredients we have three cups of all-purpose flour four teaspoons of sugar it's a slightly contentious ingredient in biscuits the thing is this is below any threshold where you'd ever perceive it as sweet the primary purpose of the sugar in here is for browning we get really nice browning on these i also have a tablespoon of baking powder so this is our leavener it's got the acidic and the basic ingredient all in there that gives us all of our lift which means adding baking soda is actually for flavor and browning flavor flavor the actual flavor of baking soda and things like pancakes and biscuits is unmistakable if it's not there you would really notice it so we have a quarter teaspoon of baking soda and finally one and a quarter teaspoons of salt and i'm just gonna whisk this until it's combined okay so that is perfectly combined there so now we're gonna get into our cream it's got our fat and our water before i add it i'm actually going to do something pretty crazy i'm going to head to the microwave you're going to heat it up i'm going to heat it up so one of the rules of biscuit making and the classic style is keep everything cold right cold butter cold buttermilk this is totally opposite of that so i'm going to take this to microwave and we're going to heat it to about 95 to 100 degrees which is going to take 16 to 90 seconds and what i'm actually doing is i'm melting the butter fat that's in this so cream looks like a liquid it's got tiny tiny droplets of butter fat dispersed throughout that are solid and you're going to see that this actually thins out and it's going to make a droppable dough all right let's see so this has been about 60 seconds it's 95 to 100 degrees and you can even see that it's more thin than it was before so i'm going to add it to my dry ingredients here so then i'm just using a spatula and stirring it together the cool thing about this recipe is you really don't have to be careful with this you know a lot of times we talk about just barely mixing a muffin batter together you get too much gluten development there's a lot of fattening cream about 36 percent so there is tons of fat to coat all of the flour so you can really mix this until it is perfectly smooth all right now just to prove how loose that dough is when made with warm cream i have the same dry ingredients in this bowl and two cups of cream but this cream is fresh from the fridge so that it's nice and cold and i'm going to stir this in and just show the difference that warm cream makes so starting to look a little dry yep it's starting to feel really dry oh getting a little stiff on you yeah look at this i don't even have enough liquid to really even get all the dry bits in the bottom of the bowl so here's the thing you'll have a dough that looks like this if you add more cream to that right to make it droppable right and when it gets in the oven and that butter fat melts they turn into pancakes same ingredients same mixing method the difference is the temperature of one of the ingredients that's incredible pretty crazy right so now we are totally smooth on this batter it looks wrong in every way right every biscuit sense this looks incorrect so now it is time to form our biscuits so we could be rolling and stamping and all that fun stuff we're not going to be we're going to be using our third of a cup measure here so i'm just spraying it lightly with cooking spray scoop it up and drop it on now i like to make sure we drop kind of straight you get a nice biscuit looking shape out of the third of a cup and we'll just keep repeating this is a recipe where you want to make sure you're preheating your oven before you start doing anything because that's going to take the longest of anything so as it starts to stick like that just reach for my spray and put a little bit more on there and we're going to get 10 biscuits out of this so the other really nice thing about this dough i mean it's just so friendly across the board is at this point you can you can get in there and make some adjustments so if you had one that kind of fell over a little bit absolutely pick it up move it around they've got a nice little coating of spray on them so they're not going to stick to your fingers can pretty up your biscuits pretty up your biscuits exactly believe it or not we're already ready to bake these i like it so we're going to go into a 450 degree oven on the upper middle rack go for about 10 to 12 minutes we're going to rotate halfway through all right gorgeous golden brown on top oh wow these look awesome perfect beautiful oh man these look and smell fantastic they really do now you'd never mistake them for a stamped biscuit but it is the tidiest looking drop biscuit i've ever seen right i agree now some people will say it's not a biscuit without butter i agree right so we're gonna brush on two tablespoons of unsalted melted butter butter for flavor at the end i like it and a little gloss it soaks right in oh it smells so good it does smell really good all right so these are ripping hot we're not going to dig them to right now how long do they need to cool just about five minutes we're gonna eat them while they're still really nice and warm okay all right enough waiting we gotta get into these um i want you to pick the one that you want though i think this one very good choice i like that this has a nice crack in the middle that i can split open oh look at that one thing i can tell right off the bat it's not dry a lot of times those drop biscuits are a little bready and dry all right a little bit of jam nice just a little just on one half i like that yeah well try both ways that's it all right unjammed half first this is a tender tender biscuit um that's a good biscuit you would never know it was as easy as it is based on how good it is very often those wet biscuits you have a lot of gluten it's quite chewy this it just disappears and that crust on the outside has good flavor and it's all-purpose flour so it's not super low protein but there's enough fat in there that coats everything makes it really really tender and really rich i would actually make these and serve them with soup for dinner or chili because they're so easy stands up to the jam just pointing that out yeah and i love recipes like this amount of effort that goes in and then the payoff yep you serve these to guests and everyone is so excited and you know it took you 15 minutes to do dan i can see why these are called dream biscuits i mean it's a cheesy name but they are that good well done thanks so there you have it if you want to make these ground-breaking biscuits start by mixing all-purpose flour with baking powder and baking soda and a little sugar heat heavy cream to about 100 degrees then stir it into the dry ingredients to make a very soft dough portion the biscuits using a greased one-third cut measure and bake for just 10 minutes so from america's test kitchen to your kitchen a fabulous new recipe for easiest ever biscuits dream on thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 967,487

Keywords: americas test kitchen, baking, biscuits, biscuits recipes, cooking, cooks country, cooks illustrated, how to make biscuits, recipes

Id: gQ9_JCSIptk

Length: 7min 23sec (443 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021