The flavour of butter is the highlight. Always use a good quality, “real” butter if you want to make the best biscuits!
True to temp
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.
Be cool
Shortbread and other butter doughs need to be chilled before rolling to stop the butter becoming too soft and the dough unmanageable. To avoid your dough sticking to the bench, try rolling between sheets of baking paper. On very hot days you may need to chill the dough before, during and after rolling, cutting and baking.
Most biscuit and shortbread doughs can be stored in the fridge for 3 to 4 days or frozen for 2 months, making it easy to get ahead and be organized.
Stop and drop the roll
If you have trouble rolling out a large piece of dough, instead form the dough into a large thick sausage shape, chill well then simply slice off rounds to bake.
Although unsalted butter is the preferred choice for bakers, spreadable butters like Western Star Soft and Spreadable Soft n Less Salt can be used straight from the fridge. For creaming butter and sugar for biscuit and cake doughs it should be used chilled.
Don’t work too hard
Shortbreads should be light, buttery and a little crumbly or “short”. Don’t overwork the dough once the flour is added and bake only until just light golden.
Creamy dream
For perfect buttercream filling for biscuits, use Western Star Soft n Less Salt straight from the fridge and make in the usual way, omitting the milk. The little touch of salt particularly compliments chocolate, coffee and caramel flavoured biscuits.
Scrap that
A great use for leftover pastry leftovers is to make shortbread crumbs. Simply place scraps on a baking tray and bake until golden. When cool either break into shards or crumble into delicious crumbs to top ice cream and desserts or use mixed with melted butter to make a cheesecake or pie crust.
Crisp up
In very humid weather, biscuits can become soft. Simply return to the oven for a few minutes to re-crisp, then cool and store as usual.
in this case, it appears that the biscuit structure is just a lot more stable (structurally speaking) when there's less butter. When you get a lot of butter, you're kind of filling your biscuit with holes, which makes it unable to bear its own weight to rise very far.
Butter enriches baked goods by contributing tenderness and moistness, and is responsible for the flakiness in biscuits, pie crusts, and puff pastry. Because of its superior flavor, most bakers select unsalted butter over all other fats for use in baking.
In general, with baking you want to use unsalted butter so that you can control the amount of salt in your final product. I tend to follow this rule, but I did notice that even the biscuit recipe that I liked the best only called for a small amount of salt.
It's super simple and makes tall, fluffy biscuits ready for breakfast, sandwiches, and more! The secret to the best biscuits is using very cold butter and baking powder. We've made a lot of biscuits, but this easy biscuits recipe is the one we turn to the most (they are so fluffy!).
Keep in mind, this ratio of 1 part butter to 1 part flour pertains to weight, not volume. And weights aren't equivalent to cup and tablespoon measurements. So, for example, if you start with 5 tablespoons of butter (70.94 grams / 2.50 ounces) you would add half a cup of flour (72.5 grams / 2.56 ounces).
Using a pastry blender, cut the butter into the flour.Continue cutting the butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs, the butter pieces will be about the size of peas. This is the perfect size to create the flaky layers.
High-fat butter, such as Kerrygold Butter, is best. The rich fat from the butter releases water when the biscuits are baking which is what contributes to the beautiful layers and flakiness that we love about biscuits.
Baking recipes typically call for unsalted butter because the amount of salt in salted butter varies depending on the brand – there is no “industry standard.” For example, if you use one brand of salted butter in a recipe, and we use another, our baked goods could end up tasting very different from one other.
The Land o' Lakes butter was the lightest in color compared to the other butters but had a very pleasant, consistent, and mild taste that made it the best affordable everyday butter.
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.
If the butter yields too easily to pressure and appears melted and oily, it will produce a silky batter that rises too soon and collapses. Your cake will have big air pockets and an uneven texture.
More fat will make softer biscuits, which could be a good thing. Too little fat will result in dry and heavy biscuits. The type of flour you use is important.
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.
Introduction: My name is Trent Wehner, I am a talented, brainy, zealous, light, funny, gleaming, attractive person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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