3/22/2015
Some biscuit recipes call for butter. Others demand shortening. Still others swear by cream cheese. Some even claim a mix: I read one article that claimed that shortening led to better flakiness and butter led to better taste, so an even mix of both would lead to the ultimate biscuit. We've already seen what the amount of fat does to a biscuit, but what does the type of fat do?
To find out, I made three batches of biscuits that were identical except for the type of fat used. I was cooking for a crowd, so I cooked each batch separately, one after the other, and asked my guests to let me know which batch tasted the best. I did not tell my guests what the difference in the batches was until everyone had told me their opinion.
Judging by appearance, I could not tell the shortening biscuits apart from the butter biscuits, but the cream cheese biscuits were a little cakier and less flaky looking.
Taste-Test Results:
Conclusion:Either butter or shortening is fine; there's no clear advantage of one over the other (except that butter is easier to incorporate into the dough by hand, especially if you grate it like cheese). Cream cheese is a decent (but inferior) alternative if you're worried about fat content (cream cheese has about half as many calories from fat as butter or shortening). Cream cheese might be an especially good option if you're making biscuits and gravy (where the biscuit is more of a vessel for the gravy anyway).
