Drop Biscuit Recipe

If you have been holding back from biscuits at home, let this be the sign for you that that should change! This Drop Biscuit recipe is insanely easy and is bound to become a favorite in your home.

This recipe is courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen. They are such a great source if you are just learning how to cook. Their cookbooks don’t just provide great recipes, they teach you the why’s behind cooking that are so invaluable and can translate to other recipes.

I love this recipe for so many reasons. Mostly, I love how fast these come together – just 20 minutes start to finish! Besides being so fast, I love that these biscuits rise perfectly. They are soft, moist, and don’t crumble. Finally, they have the perfect balance of ingredients so they don’t taste bitter, overly sweet, or greasy. They just taste like perfection.

Key Ingredients for Easy Drop Biscuit Recipe

There isn’t a lot to this very easy drop biscuit recipe. To call it simple is an understatement. But here are the three key ingredients:

• Cold buttermilk: It is important that the buttermilk is cold and full fat. The cold butter when mixed with the hot melted butter creates clumps of butter, which is key to the final biscuit. Additionally, we have made these with lower fat buttermilk and didn’t get the same results. Stick with full fat buttermilk.
• Hot melted butter: As mentioned above, when the cold buttermilk mixes with the hot melted butter it creates little clumps of butter. When that is added to the batter and baked, the butter melts and creates beautiful little pockets of steam which leaves you with the perfect biscuit.
• All purpose flour: Read below on how to ensure that you have properly measured flour.

How to Make Drop Biscuits

This is a brief overview to show you just how easily this quick recipe comes together.

1. Mix together the dry ingredients. In a bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt.
2. Combine the cold buttermilk and hot melted butter. I suggest leaving the buttermilk in the refrigerator until right before you add it to the butter. Do this in a separate bowl from the flour mixture.
3. Combine the ingredients. Pour the buttermilk mixture into the flour mixture and combine just until you don’t see streaks of flour and the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl.
4. Drop into biscuits. I like to do this with a greased 1/4 cup measuring cup. Drop the dough onto a prepared baking sheet.
5. Bake and enjoy! These bake in the oven for 12 to 14 minutes and are great hot right out of the oven.

Measuring Flour for Baked Goods

A key mistake in so many baking recipes is packing flour. This results in more flour than the recipe calls for, which means dry and crumbly baked goods. The best solutions for this, hands down, is to weigh your flour. But, many home cooks don’t have kitchen scales. If you would like like to go that route, this is the scale I recommend. Otherwise, the following steps will ensure that you have the correct amount of flour.

1. Whisk the flour in whatever container you store it in. Whether it is in a cute jar on your countertop or the bag it came in the pantry, you will want to whisk the flour in that container before measuring.
2. Scoop the flour using a spoon. Most commonly, this is where the error occurs. People will use the dry measuring cup to scoop the flour and this is when the packing happens. Packing flour can lead to 25% more flour in your recipe. Use the spoon to scoop the flour into the dry measuring cup.
3. Use a dry measuring cup. Measuring cups in the U.S. are sold as dry measuring cups that come in the amounts of 1 cup, 1/2 cup, 1/3 cup, and 1/4 cup and stack. Glass measuring cups are sold in 1 cup, 2 cups, and 4 cups. They are glass, see through, and have the measuring marks on the side. Those are used for measuring liquid and should never be used to measure flour.
4. Level the flour off. Once you have scooped it into the measuring cup, level it off with the flat edge of a spatula.