Flaky Vegan Biscuits Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What are the two most important things to do to ensure a flaky and tender biscuit? ›

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.

The biscuit cooking method is used for biscuits, shortcakes, and scones. The goal of this technique is to create a baked good that is light, flaky, and tender all at the same time. Flakiness is created by coating small pieces of fat with the dry ingredients in a process referred to as “cutting-in” the fat.

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.

The key to flaky biscuits is in the fat. Fat—butter and shortening in this recipe—creates the tender texture of biscuits and helps form the flaky layers. Butter delivers rich flavor. But because shortening contains no water, it creates more-distinct layers, which is why our Test Kitchen uses a combination of the two.

Buttermilk adds a tangy flavor to the biscuits and makes them slightly more tender.

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.

What's the Difference Between Buttermilk Biscuits and Regular Biscuits? As the names might suggest, regular biscuits do not contain buttermilk, while these do. Regular biscuits are typically prepared with milk or water instead. Buttermilk adds a nice tang to the biscuit flavor and helps them rise better.

Pastry Blender: Sometimes referred to as a "pastry cutter," this tool helps you cut fat into dry ingredients to create flaky biscuits, scones and pie crusts.

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.

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.

Should you chill biscuit dough before baking? ›

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.

SouthernKitchen.com says, "Ask any Southern chef or sagacious biscuit grandma and you'll hear a pattern emerge: they all swear by White Lily flour."

Choosing between shortening and lard comes down to personal preference. Both create a flaky, tender crust, are semi-solid, and are 100% fat. Swap one for the other in recipes. If you want to add additional flavor to the dish, lard is the right choice.

The melting point of lard is lower than butter, which means that more air and steam are released during bake times. This results in greater leavening and a flakier texture in baked goods. Lard also has larger fat crystals that leave open spaces as they melt, creating more layers than you would achieve with butter.

To create flaky layers in your biscuits, it's important that you fold the dough a few times. When cutting the butter into your dough, the fat forms small pockets coated by flour. By folding the dough you create layers of those fat pockets and flour.

Some bakers use both butter and shortening to capture the best qualities of each, but I prefer to use all butter because of its better taste. Fats contribute to the flakiness and tenderness of pastry by being layered in between sheets of thin dough.

The process of making a flaky pastry involves “cutting” one quarter of the total fat into the flour such as a pie dough till it forms what resembles coarse meal. Proper incorporation of the fat, in this step, provides flour lubrication and restricts or at least delays its quick absorption of added water.