A happy accident a few weeks ago led to yet another change in my gluten free drop biscuits recipe. I ran out of soy flour and added an additional 1/2 c. of cornstarch to make up for the shortfall. The result. . . fluffy, tender biscuits that I would put up against anyone’s gluten filled biscuit.
These biscuits freeze really well too. I usually make a batch on Saturday morning, cook 6 for our breakfast and then freeze the remaining 10 biscuits in two pans. These pans eventually find their way into our oven during the week. Just bake for 30 minutes while you get dressed, and breakfast is done.
If drop biscuits are not quite your thing, then you need to try my recipe for cut-out biscuits. It’s included in my e-book, The Gluten Free Survival Guide.
Instructions
Yield: 16 large biscuits
- 1 1/2 c. brown rice flour
- 2 c. corn starch*
- 1/2 c. soy flour or sorghum flour
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 2 tsp. salt
- 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 2 tsp. xanthan gum
- 1 stick of butter* (chilled in the freezer)
- 1 1/4 c. soy milk*
- 1 1/4 c. water
- 1 Tbsp. cider vinegar*
- 1 egg, beaten (or the equivalent amount of your favorite egg replacement)
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
- In a large mixing bowl thoroughly combine the flours, baking powder, salt, baking soda, and xanthan gum.
- Grate the butter into the flour using the small holed side of a box grater. Mix the butter into the flour so that there are no large balls of grated butter.
- Add the soy milk, water, vinegar and beaten egg to the flour and stir until the dry and liquid ingredients are combined.
- Using a large spoon, drop the dough onto a greased pan to make 16 biscuits. Cook at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or until golden brown.
Cook’s Notes:
- If you’re not vegan or dairy free, feel free to use 1 c. buttermilk in place of the soy milk and vinegar. If you’re allergic to soy, try using your usual milk substitute and keep the vinegar in the recipe.
- You may substitute potato starch or tapioca flour for the cornstarch.
- 1 stick of butter = 8 Tbsp. = 1/2 c. = 1/4 lb. = 115 grams
- Earth Balance Buttery Sticks should work if you need this to be casein free. I just checked their website and the sticks are gluten and dairy free.
- Thanks to Kate at Gluten Free Gobsmacked for the tip on grating the butter. It was a lot of fun and decreased my prep time by quite a bit.
I made these biscuits for dinner with pumpkin stew. They were fabulous. I have been trying to make a good biscuit for a couple of years and just couldn’t seem to find a good recipe. This one is great. I did have to change the amount of liquid though. There is too much liquid in the recipe. TIP*** Process the brown rice in the food processor for one minute. This will make it into super-fine brown rice flour. This will get rid of any grit feeling from the brown rice. Freezing them works wonderful. Cook for 30 minutes straight from the freezer!
This is a great recipe! It was not runny,the biscuits rose just fine. And tasted really good! I ran out of rice flour(only had 1/2 cup), so made up the difference with sorgum flour.It was so nice to have biscuits that were not gritty,that were light and fluffy.
thanks for your gluten free biscuit recipe. they are wonderful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
These biscuits tasted great! No problem with the batter or anything. Thank you for the recipe!! My boyfriend had no idea they were gluten free 🙂
I made these tonight and they were fantastic! They even got a great review from the kids (15,13,10,7,2). From previous posts I reduced the milk and water to one cup each. They turned out light and fluffy, it was so nice to have biscuits again. This recipe is a keeper and one I will turn to time and time again. Thank you so much!
The most important thing i think when preparing a meal is to make sure you have reputable equipment. It’s well worth spending extra to have good suacepans and knives.
The most important thing i think when cooking food is to make sure you have good pans. It’s well worth spending extra to have good suacepans and knives.
I skipped the water and used regular milk and about 1/4 c. of sour cream ..didn’t have any buttermilk on hand…until the batter was moist enough..also preheated the pan..yumm..came out really good!
Fluffy and gluten-free almost never go together… these biscuits really are fluffy and light! Tasty too. I cut the butter in with a pastry cutter and dropped the biscuits just like cookie batter. The batter is more liquid than a wheat flour biscuit batter, but I think that may be the key to them being fluffy.
Thanks for the recipe!
I need to figure out a way to make a biscuity type of thing that contains no soy, no corn, no sugar or any sort of sweetener (that’s right, no honey, no fake sweetener, NO sweetener at all) no rice, and obviously no gluten. I also can’t use any of the gums or starches, except for arrowroot. I’m trying to sort out a way to make biscuits because I want to make a good cobbler, not to eat the biscuits by themselves; in that instance the juice of the fruit in the cobbler will stand in for sweetener.
Any ideas? Here are the baking ingredients I know I can use safely:
eggs
arrowroot starch/flour
coconut flour (though this requires a LOT of extra liquid it does result in fluffiness)
hazelnut meal
almond meal
milk is fine but sometimes I do substitute in coconut milk
butter
Earth Balance
gluten and corn free baking powder
baking soda
Hmmm. I’m probably forgetting something. I MAY be able to use teff; I haven’t tried it yet to see if I react at all. I do not do so well with legumes in general, though, so garbanzo/fava flour is out.
Generally I find that the nut meals are very heavy and won’t rise with baking powder, so I use more eggs; that gets enough of a fluff to make some very tasty pancakes that are sweetener, corn, rice, soy, wheat and tapioca free..and are high in fiber, low in carbs, and contain omega-3 fatty acids. I’m also finding that coconut flour lightens the mix enough to allow for greater fluff than with nut meals alone. I’m hoping to stick to those ingredients. Any suggestions?
Didn’t taste good at all and just realised why!! There is no sugar in the recipe 🙁
To the above that mentioned runny: Check your measuring cup for accuracy. We did a seminar on gluten free cooking at Whole Foods a few weeks back. Our pizza recipe calls for 10oz gluten free beer. an entire 12 oz bottle poured into the cup only appeared to be 10oz. Too much liquid for pizza & would have made the dough “runny” . Sugar also does this because of the moisture content. I always add my liquids a little at a time until it feels like the correct consistency, rather than relying on exact quantities that recipes call for. Too much moisture in GF baking will result in runny dough batter.
Wow!! Thank you so much! I have been g/f since i was about 4 and this is awesome to hear. 😛 Thank you sooo much (again :D)
I like these biscuits. Since the batter is moist, I make drop biscuits with them. We like them with sausage gravy for breakfast, or for dinner I add garlic and shredded cheddar cheese to the mixture prior to baking and after they come out of the oven I brush them with a small amount of melted butter and garlic salt over the top of the biscuits. They remind me of the gluten filled biscuits I used to get at Red Lobster prior to going gluten free. Enjoy! Thanks for the recipe! Its a keeper~
My biscuits took twice as long to bake at 350, and they were STILL too gooey in the middle… What did I do wrong? The dough, far from being runny, was very crumbly – did not stick together well… should I have added more liquid? These were quite disappointing, but gritty, as has been mentioned, due to the rice flour.
We made biscuits these week for the first time in years using the Bob’s Redmill recipe and they turned out tasting like hard little dog biscuits. It was very disappointing. So I went looking for a better recipe and found yours. We were concerned about the moisture issue so we dropped the liquid to 2 cups like other’s suggested and they turned out fabulous. We used a 1/3 cup measuring cup to evenly distribute the dough into a muffin tin and that worked beautifully. Thank you so much for an excellent recipe!
SO the recipe calls for:
“1 1/4 c. soy milk*
1 1/4 c. water”
you might consider changing your wording to simply “1/4 c. soy milk*” and “1/4 c. water” to eliminate the confusion that myself and many others here have run into. The added liquid forced me to make an ENORMOUS batch of biscuits-which my co workers loved, but wasn’t in my plan for the evening.
I used this recipe as dumplings on top of beef stew. 15 minutes uncovered and 15 minutes covered. I followed an earlier posters suggestion and used less liquid and I used 2 Tbsp shortening and 2Tbsp butter instead of all butter. They were very good and resulted in my best attempt at gluten free dumplings and closely resembled the dumplings I used to make before gluten free.
I can’t have vinegar. what do you recommend as a substitute for the vinegar. I see it starred, but no related comments.
Thank you so much for sharing your info with all of us that have to be gluten free.
You can always use lemon juice as an acid if you can’t have vinegar. Hope this helps.
I just made these biscuits for the first time, cutting the rice milk (due to dairy allergy) and water down to 1 cup each per previous reviews. I used 1 cup tapioca flour and 1 cup potato starch in place of the cornstarch (due to corn allergy). The dough look just like biscuit dough and dropped onto the pan perfectly.
However, I have baked nearly 40 minutes at 350 degrees, and the biscuits are still not “golden brown” and are gummy inside. The bottoms are not remotely brown either. Is it possible that I need to cut the liquid down to just 1.5 cups total? Or that I need to cook them at a higher temp like 375 or 400? Very much at a loss. The taste of the gummy biscuits is very promising, so I really want to get this recipe to work! 🙂
Late to the party, I know. I had to come one and review these biscuits. I never thought I’d say this after eating anything gluten free, but these are better than the glutenous biscuits I made pre-gluten-free. They are lighter than any biscuit I ever remember having, and the taste is spot on. I used shortening instead of butter, so they didn’t get as brown as they might have with butter. I also used 2 cups buttermilk and 1/2-cup water. Other than that, I followed the recipe and had no problems with the consistency of the dough. I did mix mine in a food processor. My large spoon must have been smaller, as I made 19 biscuits. Thank you for a marvelous “keeper” recipe.
I made these biscuits tonight, but didn’t have the right flours/milk etc. I used 4 c. Bob’s Red Mill Baking mix (garbanzo/potato/tapioca/sorghum/fava bean) to replace all flour/starch. I cut in CF/SF margarine with a pastry blender instead of butter & grater. I used powdered egg replacer (1 1/2t in 2 T water). I used hemp milk instead of soy. I reduced the salt to just under 1 teaspoon. All other ingredients the same.
They were fluffy (a little chewy like a sourdough) with a slight beany taste & good! I used 350 degrees convection oven since I had 2 pans. After 18 minutes tops & bottoms were golden brown. Very nice.
We are new to Gluten free and after baking wheat bread for many years I’m having such a tough time finding GF recipes that work well, these were perfect! I followed the recipe almost exactly using 1 & 1/4 c.lactaid and 1 & 1/4 c.warm water, the batter was very thick and made 19 large drop biscuits that went great with my GF pot pie recipe. For breakfast I’ll add a little honey to the recipe. Thank you so much!
These were absolutely perfect!! Thanks for the recipe.
I noticed that your flour combinations include corn starch. Have you ever used potato starch? Would it work or is there something wrong with using it in the combinations? I’m new to all of this. Thanks!
This was my first attempt at a gluten free bread recipe and I am very encouraged. I am not gluten intolerant but make efforts to cut back where possible.(Too much of one thing in our diet does not keep the body guessing and there is definately too much gluten in a LOT of what we eat!) These biscuits are such a painless way of having a gluten free meal I can’t see why I would make any others for my soups or stews from here forward.
I added the vigegar to the soy milk to curdle and mixed the egg replacer to thicken while working on other stuff so that the two would be ready when it was time to mix. I poured in the curdled soy milk and thickened egg replacer first and eyeballed the dough while stirring with a fork. I slowly added water from a cup I had set aside until the consistancy was right for drop biscuit dough.
This recipe is definately a keeper!
I cut down the liquid to 2 c total and substituted the corn starch (corn intolerance). They were fluffy and soft inside after an extra 5 minutes cook time. I used 1 cup potato starch and 1 cup tapioca starch/flour. Too much tapioca for my taste but we’ll eat them and try again with another starch.
Thanks so much
Thanks for this! I added grated asiago cheese and they are fantastic!
These biscuits came out so light, and they are delicious.