The 1 Thing You Should Avoid For Perfect Homemade Biscuits

Flaky, golden, and buttery, the biscuit is an excellent side bread. If you're having salad for dinner, bring out some biscuits at the end of the meal to soak up the dressing on your plate. Or if you're chowing down on an incredible meal full of meats and veggies, add a basket of biscuits to the table and people will devour them. The best parts about biscuits is their undeniable flakiness, that they are inherently light and fluffy, and are a wonderfully absorbent.

Like pie crust and other pastries, biscuits rely on cold butter cut into the dry ingredients (via Baker Bettie) by not fully incorporating the butter into the bake; defined layers will appear while the dough cooks in the oven. Like with most pastry doughs, all ingredients need to be kept cool and not be fully incorporated. A good, old-fashioned biscuit also involves a proper bake so set that oven high. This is not one of those recipes that relies on a low slow temperature. A hot, quick bake will force the buttermilk and butter to steam and push the dough sky high, but there is another trick to use to make sure that your biscuits have the proper lift (via Southern Kitchen).

Before placing it on your baking pan, cut your dough into biscuits. It is important to get a sharp, clean cut on the dough so it does not become squished and then have trouble rising (via King Arthur Baking). When you're ready to transfer your dough onto a pan, remember not to treat your biscuits like cookies. Southern Living advises placing your biscuits close together, not far apart. Don't place the dough pieces so close that they are already touching, but close enough that when the biscuits do end up expanding, they will run up against each other and be forced to rise upward instead of outward.

Again, part of what makes biscuits so appealing is the layers of tall, fluffy bread, so you must position them close enough to each other so that they don't fall flat. If your incredible southern-style biscuits are consistently falling flat, there could be other contributing factors such as overworked dough, not using enough baking powder, and not chilling your butter could all be reasons that your biscuits deflated. But don't let pan placement be one of the failures of them.