What I learned about biscuits today.
(using “biscuit” in the American sense, here.)
Yes, I also made pumpkin bread, but… a quick bread like that one is basically just a muffin in a loaf pan. So, that’s all been covered.
Biscuits are similar to muffins in that they are simple. Too simple. It’s almost creepy how simple they are, and the easiest way to mess them up is by saying, “it can’t be this easy!” and making things harder for yourself… and screwing up the biscuits in the process.
The shortening is what you have to pay the closest attention to… but, at the same time, you can’t mess with it too much. Making sure your fat is cold is most important, because you want your dough to-
Mix minimally. By the time you’re rolling out the dough, you should still be seeing little chunks of shortening. You see, the steam produced by the fat component of the dough is part of a biscuit’s leavening. If everything is perfectly incorporated, your biscuit dough will instead be nothing but cookie dough with extra baking powder, by which I mean that it will not be all flaky. It will have the texture of a cookie. And… you probably don’t want that.
