Angel Biscuits Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is an angel biscuit? ›

Light, flaky and divine, there's a reason we call these biscuits angelic. This classic homemade angel biscuit recipe uses not one, but three types of leavening agents including yeast, baking powder and baking soda, resulting in the fluffiest biscuits imaginable.

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.

Crisco may be beneficial for other baking applications, but for biscuit making, butter is the ultimate champion!

Dr Gadoud said: “Funeral biscuits were biscuits served at or associated with funerals. They were generally two biscuits wrapped up and presented to each person attending the funeral or sent out with the invite to the funeral or afterwards.

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."

For super light, crumbly biscuits try grating or pushing the yolks of hard-boiled eggs through a sieve into the biscuit dough. This increases the fat content and slows down the development of gluten. Cookie recipes on the other hand are more likely to contain eggs. Adding moisture as well as binding the mixture.

But if you chill your pan of biscuits in the fridge before baking, not only will the gluten relax (yielding more tender biscuits), the butter will harden up. 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.

Heavy Cream.

The heavy cream adds flavor to the biscuit by adding a little more fat and helps hydrate the dough. The extra fat in the heavy cream is helpful because buttermilk in stores is often “low-fat” buttermilk.

Buttermilk adds a nice tang to the biscuit flavor and helps them rise better.

Why is buttermilk better for biscuits? ›

Buttermilk is used in biscuit-making for its acid and fat content. Its acidity works with the leaveners to help the dough rise, producing a taller and fluffier biscuit. Buttermilk also adds a subtle tang. Cream biscuits are made with heavy cream.

Rolled Oats (49%), Vegetable Oils (Rapeseed, Sustainable Palm), Sugar, Salt, Flavourings. For allergen information, including cereals containing gluten see ingredients in bold. May also contain Egg, Milk, Soya and Tree Nuts.

During the Age of Exploration, sailors, like pirates and explorers, would sometimes not see a dock for months. Without a refrigerator, they needed something to eat that would last for longer periods of time, so they made hard tack or ship's biscuits. Hardtack was baked on land and then stored on board the ship.

A little bit more rustic than their rolled cousins, drop biscuits are made by 'dropping' a spoonful of moist dough onto a baking sheet, rather than rolling them out and shaping them carefully with a cutter. Drop biscuits contain more liquid than rolled ones and don't tend to rise as high as other biscuits.

The first mention of angel biscuits was in 1950, although the actual creator is debated, as it is unclear which Southern flour brand first developed the recipe. Some claim it was an employee at White Lily, while others think it came from an employee at Martha White.