For Light And Fluffy Biscuits, Try Adding Some Cream Cheese

Every baker swears by a different recipe when baking homemade biscuits, but some techniques reign better than others. From opting for higher temperature settings to throwing in a whole slew of unexpected ingredients, a lot of different suggestions for quality biscuits exist. The options are so endless that it took an entire year for Joanna Gaines to perfect her biscuit recipe. 

Clearly everyone likes their biscuits made a little differently, but a common goal of every biscuit batch is to make something that's both light and fluffy. If you're struggling with biscuits that end up as hard as hockey pucks, or simply something with an underwhelming flavor, you just might not be adding the right ingredients. For extra fluffy biscuits, try adding some cream cheese to your recipe. 

Cream cheese makes for an extra moist batch of biscuits if you use it right,and it also lends a pleasant richness and tang to the dough that augments the usual flavors. Still, not every variety of cream cheese is perfect for baking. Here's how to know what kind of cream cheese to opt for when baking biscuits, and a little bit more on what it can do.

Cream cheese might seem like an unusual ingredient to add into biscuit dough, but it brings forward a whole lot of desirable flavors. Let's talk about what type exactly you should be adding into your dough.

Just like with butter in many other baking recipes, the cream cheese you should use in a biscuit recipe should be both cold and cubed. Always choose cream cheese blocks for baking, they're superior to tubs for this purpose, and here's why. The block form of cream cheese makes baked goods extra fluffy because, unlike with spreadable or room temperature cream cheese, cold cream cheese will melt during baking and create distinctive layers in the biscuits. This makes for an extra fluffy batch. Spreadable cream cheese is already whipped and is lighter than block cream cheese so it won't create those same layers. Instead, whipped cream cheese will easily melt in with the other ingredients making for a much flatter biscuit. The bottom line: Make sure you opt for the right variety of cream cheese before mixing up a batch. 

While adding cream cheese is an unexpectedly great trick for baking up a fluffy batch of biscuits, here are some other techniques to keep in mind when you're trying to bake extra light biscuits.

While adding cream cheese can truly elevate the quality of your biscuits, there are a few other techniques you can employ to ensure that they are as light as possible. For starters, remember to avoid one of the most common mistakes novice bakers make: over-kneading. While it's important to work the dough to get all of the ingredients incorporated together, don't overdo it. Leaving space between ingredients helps air pockets to form in the dough while it's baking, which makes for an extra fluffy batch of biscuits.

Another important element of baking extra fluffy biscuits is to keep the oven hot. Higher temperatures in an oven will help the water within the biscuit dough quickly turn into steam while cooking. This steam helps the biscuits rise quickly which makes for something a little extra fluffy to indulge in.

Now if they're all done right, these simple techniques combined with a quality cream cheese can help a baker of any level create some of the fluffiest homemade biscuits around. So try them all out and enjoy.