How to Make Tender, Fluffy Biscuits in Under an Hour

A freshly baked biscuit, still warm from the oven, is deeply pleasurable to eat—and it’s an experience I try to give my family as often as possible. Each bite is tender, flaky, and buttery, the perfect vessel for even more butter. Unfortunately, between my neighbors, husband, and ravenous toddler, each batch gets demolished faster than I can say “biscuit dough.”

Though biscuits aren’t difficult to make, they do require time and planning: You have to roll and chill the dough, which takes up quite a bit of space on both your kitchen counter and in your fridge. My solution to that is to skip the rolling and chilling entirely by making drop biscuits, which are faster and easier than rolled biscuits, but just as delicious.

Many biscuit recipes have you whisk the dry ingredients together, toss and press cold butter with the flour mixture until it’s small and pea-sized, then incorporate a liquid like buttermilk, sour cream, and/or milk to form a shaggy dough. This dough is then laminated—the process of folding a dough over and over itself to create multiple layers—before it’s chilled and cut into rounds or squares. As the biscuits bake, the butter melts, creating little pockets of steam that set into crisp, flaky layers.

With drop biscuits, there’s no need to laminate or roll. You simply have to pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, stir them together until just combined, then scoop and drop the dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.

The recipe below comes from our Birmingham, Alabama-based test kitchen colleague Craig Ruff, who baked batches and batches of drop biscuits to come up with a recipe for the very best ones. Not only are Craig’s biscuits extremely tender, but they’re deeply flavorful, too. Fresh chives, sharp cheddar, and a touch of dried garlic and onion make the biscuits wonderfully savory, while buttermilk provides a pleasant tang. Here’s how to make your own.

The Key Techniques for Making the Very Best Drop Biscuits

Use soft wheat flour. The higher a flour’s protein content, the higher its gluten potential. While gluten can be helpful in providing baked goods with their structure, too much gluten can result in unpleasantly tough and chewy pastries. Most of the wheat grown in the U.S. is either hard wheat or soft wheat; hard wheats, which can contain 11 to 15 percent protein, are best for bread or pizza doughs, while soft wheats, which contain about five to nine percent protein, are ideal for tender pastries like cookies, cakes, and biscuits. To avoid developing too much gluten in the drop biscuit dough, Craig recommends using a soft wheat flour like White Lily. 

Don’t shy away from the alliums. Fresh chives provide the biscuits with a sweet grassy note, but to help amplify their flavor, Craig also incorporates granulated onion and garlic, and brushes the biscuits with an aromatic garlic butter. Together, they give the biscuits bold allium notes.

Melt your butter, then stir it into cold buttermilk. Though some drop biscuit recipes may have you cut cold butter into the dry ingredients before you add the wet ingredients, some recipes, including Craig’s, use melted butter to make the dough even more seamless to whip up. Craig’s method is clever: He pours melted butter into cold buttermilk, which helps it solidify into pea-sized pieces—making it unnecessary to cut cold butter into flour. 

Once your dough comes together, all that’s left to do is to drop dollops of dough onto a sheet tray, bake, and brush them with butter. 

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