Tips for High-Rise Biscuits

To get the best results from high-rise biscuits, use these tips and tricks:

• For biscuits with major rise, pop any tools into the freezer for a few minutes before mixing to ensure that fats won’t melt until they’re in the oven.
• Patting the dough into a circle compresses it less than rolling it with a rolling pin, giving you a loftier biscuit.
• Use a sharp biscuit cutter to cut your biscuits. Juice glasses and tin cans trap air and compress biscuit dough, sealing the sides and reducing rise — don’t use them.
• Excess flour on the tops and bottoms of biscuits can make them seem dry, so brush any excess off before baking.

The Fine Art of Making Buttermilk Biscuits
from http://spinningsugar.wordpress.com/

Biscuits appear to be the simplest of all breads to make, but they are anything but.  Made merely from a mixture of flour, leavening (baking powder or soda), salt, fat (usually butter), and liquid (buttermilk or cream), there are strict rules to follow to provide the tender, moist, smooth, airy, delicious confections our grandmothers made. 

1. Topping that list of rules is to keep everything COLD, just like pie crust.  Freeze your butter.  No kidding.  If you have a food processor, great.  Cut up the butter into 1/4 inch pieces and add to your dry ingredients, pulsing 8 or 10 times until the butter is evenly mixed.  OR, do it the old-fashioned way:  get out a box grater.  Put your dry ingredients into a large bowl (chill the dry stuff first) and rub the frozen butter against the large holes in the grater placed over the bowl with the dry ingredients.  Using your fingertips (not hands), quickly “rub” the pieces of butter into the dry stuff.  Then pop back into the freezer again to rechill.  Little visible bits of butter are great for biscuits, so don’t worry that the butter must be perfectly incorporated.

The reason for chilling is simple. If the fat (butter) softens and binds with the dry ingredients during rubbing, it will form a pasty goo.  The spaces between the flour particles collapse and the biscuits become as heavy as lead.  Chilling is the secret to preventing this.

2. After rubbing in the butter, buttermilk is added and the dough is stirred JUST until the ingredients are bound together. You’re trying NOT to create gluten here. Understand you will end up with a soft, slightly sticky dough.  The wet dough will create steam when the biscuits bake and this steam will ensure a light, airy texture.
   
3. A word about flour here.  The very best biscuits are made using equal parts of all purpose flour and cake flour.  If you don’t have cake flour on hand, substitute all purpose flour, but increase the buttermilk by 2 tablespoons.
   
4. Finally, biscuits need quick heat to cook properly.  So make certain your oven is preheated and you place your biscuits in the very center of the oven to cook.  As soon as they are light brown, they are done, and overcooking them will dry them out in a flash.

If there is a delay before you will be serving them, you can easily make the dough several hours in advance, keep chilled in the fridge, and bake when needed.  They will still rise well.

From J. Kenji López-Alt at https://www.seriouseats.com/:

As you work the hard butter into the flour, you end up with a mealy mix comprised of small bits of butter coated in flour, some amount of a flour-and-butter paste, and some completely dry flour. Now add your liquid to this mix, and what happens? Well, the dry flour immediately begins to absorb water, forming gluten. Meanwhile, the flour suspended in the flour-butter paste doesn't absorb any water at all, and, of course, you've still got your clumps of 100% pure butter.

Kneading the dough will cause the small pockets of gluten to gradually link together into larger and larger networks. (You want to knead the ingredients just until they come together.) All the while, butter-coated flour and pure butter are suspended within these networks. As you roll the dough out, everything gets flattened and elongated. The gluten networks end up stretched into thin layers separated by butter and butter-coated flour.

Finally, as the biscuits bake, a couple things occur. First, the butter melts, lubricating the spaces between the thin gluten sheets. Next, moisture—from both the butter and the liquid added to the dough—begins to vaporize, forming bubbles that rapidly increase in volume and inflate the interstitial spaces between the gluten layers, causing them to separate. Meanwhile, remember there's also baking powder and baking soda involved. This causes the parts of the dough that are made up of flour and liquid to leaven and inflate, adding tenderness and making the texture of the biscuits lighter.

For an extra boost of flakiness, I like to go one step further and make what's called a laminated pastry: pastry that has been folded over and over itself to form many layers. The doughs for classic French laminated pastries, like puff pastry and croissants, are folded until they form hundreds of layers. With my biscuit dough, I'm not quite so ambitious, but I've found that by rolling it out into a square and folding it into thirds in both directions, you create nine distinct layers (3 × 3). Roll the resultant package out into a square again and repeat the process, and you've got yourself a whopping 81 layers (9 × 3 × 3)! How's that for flaky?