Are biscuits and ultra-processed food?
For a lot of people, making biscuits means popping open a tube of biscuit dough and putting the rounds on a baking sheet. This method is fast and easy way to get biscuits in the oven.
These ready-to-bake tubes of biscuit dough are an ultra-processed food. For example, Pillsbury Grands! Flaky Layers Biscuit includes the following ingredients:
Enriched Flour Bleached (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Soybean And Palm Oil, Sugar, Hydrogenated Palm Oil, Baking Powder (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate), Contains 2% Or Less Of: Vital Wheat Gluten, Dextrose, Fractionated Palm Oil, Salt, Potassium Chloride, Xanthan Gum, Mono And Diglycerides, Preservatives (Tbhq, Citric Acid), Beta Carotene (For Color).
Generations of cooks have made biscuits without having expanding tubes of biscuit dough. But in the rush of making a breakfast or a holiday dinner, there is a lot to be said about the speed and convenience.
This is a recipe for from scratch biscuits that does not contain any ultra-processed ingredients, and is also very quick to make up. I hope you like these biscuits, and they are a quick way to add to a meal.
Different types of biscuits
For how few ingredients go into making a biscuit, there sure are a lot of different ways to make them. Biscuits can generally be divided into drop-biscuits and rolled-biscuits.
Drop biscuits come together quickly, have a craggy top, and are not perfectly circular. Rolled biscuits are round circles that can easily be split into even flaky layers. Making rolled biscuits can take a lot longer and rely on having space to roll out the dough and cut the biscuits.
There are also a lot of variations on the type of liquid that goes in the biscuit. Some people prefer cream, whole milk, or buttermilk.
This is a recipe that is very quick to make because it does not involve rolling out dough, and uses cream instead of grating butter.
How to make a simple drop biscuit
Equipment
Spatula or mixing spoon
Knife
Measuring cups and spoons
Ingredients
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 cups cream
1/2 teaspoon salt
Directions
Preheat oven to 425 degrees
Have your baking sheet ready to go with the parchment paper laid out on top of it.
Use your whisk to mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Make very sure there are no clumps of the baking powder.
Add the cream to the bowl.
Use your mixing spoon to mix the cream into the flour. Do not use an electric mixer, and be sure not to mix very much. You want the cream to just barely moisten all of the flour.
Use a spoon to drop the batter onto the baking sheet. Do this similar to how you would make cookies. Make sure the dough blobs are of fairly even size and spread out evenly on the baking sheet.
Bake the biscuits in the oven for 12 – 15 minutes. Tops should be turning brown.
Ingredient notes
Flour
Look for flour that says it is unbleached.
You can use self-rising flour instead of all-purpose flour. If you use self-rising flour omit the baking powder and the salt, because it is already mixed into the flour.
Do not substitute cake flour or bread flour.
White Lily is a popular brand of flour for making biscuits. It is made out of a type of wheat that is lower in gluten than other varieties of wheat. The lower gluten makes the biscuits say soft and flaky.
Flour is often sold as enriched with various vitamins. In some places it is a legal requirement for all flour to be enriched.
Baking powder
Baking powder is an ingredient that is often confused with baking soda. In the United States the most common brand of baking powder is Clabber Girl, which is sold in small white canisters.
If your biscuits come out too dense, it could be caused by using old baking powder. Ideally baking powder should be used within three months of opening the container.
I do not consider baking powder to be an ultra-processed food because I consider it to be a processed culinary ingredient. Baking powder has been used in home cooking for making foods like biscuits for generations.
Cream
It can be difficult to find cream that has not had thickeners added to it. Be sure to check the ingredients of the cream that you are buying if you are trying to avoid ultra-processed foods.
Cream that is not UHT and comes from a dairy closer to you is more likely not to contain additives such as gellan gum.