How to Bake A Batch of Biscuits

Biscuits
©Dawn Gagnon Photography 2017




This is a double batch recipe and should yield around 10 to 12 very high lofty flaky biscuits. You can make them smaller and less high rising by cutting this recipe in half but this is the way I get those good high rising biscuits you see in the photo above. 
One trick I have learned about biscuits, and I'm passing it on to you. Some recipes say you need ice cold milk, frozen butter grated..etc etc etc. Non sense! Just mix your ingredients form your dough and pop in the freezer for about 15 minutes. You can also pop the already cut biscuits in the freezer for about 10 minutes if you wish as well. This gives your shortening or butter the time to harden, and from what I can tell you get the same results less work. I guarantee you, they'll come out great! Its too hard and aggravating to freeze and grate butter! 

Things You'll Need:

* 1 cup shortening
* 4 cups all purpose flour
* 4 tsp. baking powder
*1/2 tsp salt

*1 tsp cream of tartar
*1 & 1/3 cup of milk

Instructions:



Step 1
Preheat oven to 450 degrees

Step 2

In a large bowl  whisk all your dry ingredients together.

Step 3
Cut shortening or butter  into flour and mix well until all mixture is crumbled and resembles pea sized clumps. Slowly stir in milk until a dough ball forms and pulls away from sides of the bowl. Add more flour to dough ball so you can handle if it is too sticky.

Step 4
Flour your counter or cutting board liberally, you can cover your counter with plastic wrap,parchment paper or wax paper if you want to save a lot of trouble cleaning later.  Make sure to add flour on top of it as well for best results. .Roll out your dough to form a rectangle. Then fold it by half and roll out again, to the original size..I'd say we're looking for about 8 by 11 inches or so..fold in half again and roll out again. Repeat one more time. This will give you lofty layers of biscuit by folding and rolling out. Now once you've done this a few times. be sure in your final roll out  do not roll your dough thinner than 1/2 an inch. Baking powder can only work so many miracles..

Step 5
Take a biscuit cutter, or a glass tumbler that has been dipped in flour on the edges and begin cutting your biscuits. Do not press and twist when cutting your biscuits, this seals the edges and stops them from rising as much as they need to. Place them on an un-greased cookie sheet and make sure they touch each other. This is important as for some reason unknown to me this helps them rise.  Bake for around  12 minutes depending on your oven. I always start peeking around 10 minutes. When biscuits have risen and are lightly golden they are ready.


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