A Basic Biscuit Dough: Easy Baking Powder Biscuits for Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Dessert!

This quick and easy baking powder biscuit recipe is the first thing I ever learned to bake. Basic baking powder biscuits are a great item to have in your cooking arsenal. They are the breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and Sunday brunch of champions!

Biscuits are easy to make and require only a few simple ingredients that almost everyone has on hand. They can accompany dinner if you are short on potatoes or just fancy something different. They can be whipped up for a quick and comforting dessert simply served with butter and jam.

The biscuit dough can be used to cover a caserole for supper (like this lucious beef stew) or be used to top a fruit cobbler. A savoury biscuit is the perfect partner for a light lunch of salad or soup.

You can, of course, enjoy these light and fluffy pastries on their own fresh from the oven.

This is an especially versatile quick bread that can be made savoury or sweet in quite short order.

It is a quick dough to make because the rising agent used is baking powder and not yeast.

Once you know the basic recipe there are any number of wonderful things you can make with it for any meal of the day.






The Ingredients

2 cups plain white flour
5 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup sugar
½ cup chilled butter or baking margarine or shortening

1/8 cup milk plus a little extra
1 egg


The Tools
1. something to mix the dough in
2. something to mix the milk and egg together in
3. a pastry cutteror a cheese grater or a couple of sharp knives
4. a baking sheet
5. an oven
6. your hands
7. something to beat the milk and egg together (fork is good)






The Method
1. Pre-heat the oven to about 350
2. Sift together the flour , baking powder, and sugar
3. Cut in the fat. You can do this with a pastry cutter or you can grate the fat into the bowl or simply use two sharp knives
4. Rub mixture in your fingers until it is bread crumby
5. Beat together the milk and egg
6. Add the wet to the dry until just combined in a soft dough. You might need to add a little more milk so it all sticks together.
7. Get it all into a ball and put onto a floured surface.
8. Knead it three times. And three times only
9. Roll it out to about a ½ inch - inch thickness (depends how big you want your biscuits)
10. Cut out with biscuit or cookie cutters and place on a greased baking sheet
11. Bake 20-30 minutes. They should be lightly golden and a toothpick inserted should come out clean.

The Science
The trick to getting light fluffy flaky baking powder biscuits is to remember one very important thing:

They use a chemical reaction to rise.

This is what the baking powder does. Baking powder is simply baking soda (a base) mixed with cream of tartar (an acid) when it gets wet the acid and base mix together they produce a gas (carbon dioxide in this case). It is this gas that gets trapped in the layers of flour as the fat melts and leaves little pockets.

Why is it important to remember this?

Three reasons

Reason One:
If you don’t have enough chemicals for the amount of filler (flour) you are not going to have enough gas to get them to rise

Reason Two:
Chemical reactions burn out as the chemicals concerned are consumed. If you over mix before putting it in the oven the gas will escape into the air instead of being trapped in those lovely little pockets made by the melting fat.

Reason Three:
The more pockets in your mix the more places for the gas to get trapped and make the biscuits fluffy. This is why you sift the flour. You put air in it and it makes lighter and the gas will find it easier to push the flour particles around.

Trouble Shooting

Below are all things that have happened to me over the years and with the help of my domestic scientist mom I have been able to learn from my disasters.

As much as there is a science involved here I find that so much of baking is a bit of a black art. You get a feel for things. You know when the dough is mixed just enough but it is difficult to pass that on to someone else.

The more you do it the easier it gets.

The Problem
The biscuits did not rise or did not rise much

The Solution
Classic symptom of over mixing and over kneading. Unfortunately once your biscuits are baked there isn’t much you can do about this except to slather them with butter and clotted cream and jam.

The Problem
The biscuits did rise but are quite heavy and/or hard.

The Solution
This is also a common symptom of over mixing.

Mix and kneading activate the gluten in the flour. Gluten is a protein and while it is important for a yeast dough too much gluten will make your biscuits chewy and heavy. Just like a yeast bread can be!

Again after the biscuits are baked there isn’t much you can do but you can pre-empt disaster by using cake flour.

What is cake flour? It is a flour that has a low gluten content. You can make your own substitute cake flour by taking out a tablespoon of each cup of flour in the recipe and replacing it with cornstarch.

This is also one of the occasions where sifting does pay off. To be honest I just can’t be bothered and it does make a difference.




The Problem
The biscuits are brown on the outside but still uncooked in the middle after being in the oven for over half and hour

The Solution
Lower the temperature. Everyone’s equipment works differently. The temperature I have given here is approximate. You know how your oven works so adjust accordingly.

The Next Step
The recipe given above is for a basic sweet dough biscuit. But it can be savoury as well. You don't even have to roll it out after you have mixed the dough. Just drop balls of it on the baking sheet and away you go.

That is how I used to make them for my Gramps. He called them Wonder Buns.

I have used various other renditions of this recipe for cinnamon buns, pizza bases, casserole toppings, fruit crumble toppings, cheese buns, and savoury roll ups.

For the cinnamon buns or a savoury roll up roll your dough out to a ¼ inch, spread on your filling (sugar and butter or salmon and cheese), roll up and then cut into 1 inch sections. Bake these in a greased cake pan.

For the pizza base roll out on a floured baking sheet and simply add your sauce and topping. Of course forego the sugar in the recipe above for this one. But by all means add oregano or parmesan cheese!

If you stick to the measurements and pay attention to the science you will find it hard to go wrong.

Recommendations

If you are going to make up anything with this quick bread recipe bear in mind that it does not keep very well.

You will need to bake it at once and eat what ever you have baked in the next 24 hours.

I would be surprised if anything keeps more than five days. It isn’t that it goes bad, it just goes stale. In this day and age of microwaves you can probably get away with two or three days with out anyone noticing.

That being said any baked final product does freeze quite well. Just thaw out and zap and it will taste pretty fresh.

If you are making something savoury and would like to use a whole wheat or whole meal flour be careful with the gluten content. I find that if I use half plain or cake flour and then half whole wheat the results are quite good.