Skip to main content
Dessert

Baking Powder Biscuits

A quick biscuit made with flour, salt, shortening, milk and baking powder, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baking Powder Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 450°F (230°C).

  2. Cut the shortening into the sifted flour and salt until crumbly.

  3. Add the milk gradually to form a soft dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll or pat the dough to about ½ to 1 inch thick.

  2. Cut into rounds and place on a greased baking sheet.

  3. Bake for 12-15 minutes until golden.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure that holds the biscuits together as they bake.
Shortening
Coats flour particles so the biscuits stay tender and separate into flaky layers.
Milk
Moistens the flour and brings the dough together, giving a soft texture.

The step that matters

Add the milk gradually to form a soft dough. Mixing too much after the liquid goes in develops gluten in the flour, which makes biscuits tough. Stop as soon as the dough holds together so the biscuits stay tender.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes