For A Perfectly Tender Biscuit, Butter Temperature Is Key

One of the best foods to enjoy as a side to a meaty dish is biscuits. They're also good as a snack, especially if you've made them with cheddar and eat them warm with butter. These baked delights are typically buttery, soft, and a little crispy, providing a variety of delicious flavors and textures in every bite. If you're making a batch of homemade biscuits that you want to turn out super soft and a little less flaky, then you'll want to know how to achieve that delectable tenderness. The secret is to always use room-temperature butter in your recipe.

If you mix cold butter fresh out of your refrigerator or freezer into your flour when making the dough for your biscuits, those solid chilled chunks will create sheeted layers of dough in your finished biscuits. Many biscuit recipes do call for cold butter, as they're aiming for those sheeted layers, but with warmer butter, you'll get a more evenly soft texture, a little more like cake. So, unless those doughy layers are your desired result, avoid adding cold butter when baking biscuits, otherwise they will turn out super tall, and when you pull the biscuits open, they'll come away layer by layer. However, if you mix softened butter at room temperature into your flour mixture when making the biscuit dough, it will get evenly distributed, resulting in beautifully tender biscuits once they're done baking.

If your butter is cold when you're ready to make your biscuit dough, you can leave it out on your kitchen counter for 30 minutes to an hour so that it can soften to room temperature. But if you need or want to make your biscuits in a pinch and you don't have an hour to spare, then you can get your cold butter to soften to room temperature in just 30 minutes by slicing it into cubes and letting them sit out at room temperature. The smaller cubes of butter will soften faster than a large stick. If you are really pressed for time, you can even use your body heat for softening butter, though we don't necessarily recommend it. You could opt to put the stick in the microwave in a bowl for 15 seconds instead, but do watch out or it can easily become too melted very quickly.

If you need to thaw frozen butter to room temperature for your biscuit dough, you're going to need a lot more time. You'll need to leave your frozen butter sitting out for at least three to four hours, or perhaps even overnight, so plan accordingly when making your biscuits. Once you have your softened room temperature butter, just be sure to add the right amount of it to the flour mixture for your biscuit dough to achieve that delicious tender texture when baking your biscuits.

When making the dough for your biscuits, you should add the room temperature butter to your flour first and work it in, then add the other wet ingredients, such as your milk (you can use buttermilk or even 2% milk). Once you've stirred your dry ingredients of biscuit mix, flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, and baking soda all together in a bowl, then add your wet ingredients.

Start with two tablespoons of room temperature butter to stir into the flour mixture, then you can add the rest. Make sure you stir the butter into the mixture really well or your biscuits may not rise properly while baking. To ensure the best results, smudge the butter into the flour along the inside of the bowl with a spoon until it is completely mixed into the flour. You could even add a spoonful of mayo for the fluffiest biscuits. After you bake those biscuits, every bite you take will be deliciously tender because of that room-temperature butter.