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 used to LOVE biscuits and seriously miss them! Anything I have made using different flours and such have always fallen short of the texture I remember. I can not wait to give these babies a whirl !!
Thanks 🙂
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These look unbelievably good. And let me tell you, your original recipe was already delish! They lasted about half a day in my house. 🙂 I can’t wait to try the new recipe!
These look so good. I am thinking of making one a breakfast sandwich, and another one with butter and honey, then butter and jam…
I love that you can freeze some and cook later..love that! 🙂
i like the taste of these biscuits, but that’s way too much liquid. could it be 1 1/4 c. milk OR 1 1/4 c. water?
Theresa, I hope you enjoy them =)
Theresa, they don’t last anytime at our house either. I had to start freezing them so that we wouldn’t eat 16 biscuits in one day.
SM, having tried all of those variations, I can assure you that they are all quite yummy =)
Cam, it really is 1 1/4 c. milk and 1 1/4 c. water. I checked my other biscuit recipes and the ratio of liquids to dry ingredients is consistent. However, if you’d like the biscuits to be drier, you can always reduce the amount of liquids.
Wow. I think these things must be fail proof! I mixed them with a crying 11 month old on my hip (and somehow halved the recipe correctly), accidentally turned off the preheated oven when i used the preheated oven for a time out for my 2 yr old. It took about 10 minutes for me to figure out the biscuits weren’t cooking. Man, once i turned the oven back on everything went fine and they went perfect with our soup. And they were a hit with both toddlers.
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I’m so glad I found your blog. This recipe looks simple and easy to adapt to other food issues. Nice! Thanks and I’ll be back. Take care and have a nice week.
Melissa
I just made these tonite and they are fabulous! Thank you so much for sharing this recipe!
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I grew up on biscuits and gravy and was so excited to try this recipe. But something went haywire. I thought I followed the recipe exactly to a tee but I ended up with batter instead of dough. Could this be an altitude problem–I live in Kansas? I added 1 1/4 C milk and 1 1/4 C water–did I misread something here for it to end up so soupy? I had hoped to take this as my breakfast dish to a celiac support group, but….
Hi Farmer Bean,
I’m as puzzled as you. I’ve tested that recipe more times than I would like to admit and haven’t had that problem. Did you use the full 2 cups of corn starch? and the 2 tsp. of xanthan gum? Both of those ingredients thicken the dough considerably. If this keeps happening please let me know…I hate when my recipes don’t work for somebody.
Bit late on the comment, but cooked a batch over the weekend. I subbed some different flours in a couple spots just based on what I had handy, but they were great! My first biscuits in 14 months GF, my last two attempts were not very edible so I had given up. My non GF husband loved them too, and that is the true test! Thanks
Erin, congratulations on the biscuits =) I’m always subbing flours too. Regardless of what flour mix a recipe calls for, I always try my favorite mix first.
Oh geeze oh pete these are fine. I was craving biscuits and gravy (don’t ask how the gravy went…) and whipped up a batch just now. They are probably the ugliest little biscuits I’ve ever made, but they taste a lot like the real thing.
I ran out of rice flour, so I ended up with 1/2 + 1/8 c. rice flour, 1/2 c. coconut flour and the balance of that 1 1/2 c. in sorghum flour. The rest was right on and we used the buttermilk. Do you reckon if a person were to roll them tight in wax paper and freeze them for a while, that you could cut perfect little biscuit rounds out of them?
I made these to go with supper tonight, and my husband, who is not gluten-free asked me twice if these were ok for me to eat! I loved them, and said did he… thank you!
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Rachel, that’s awesome! Thanks for letting me know. That made my day.
Holy Moly these are great! I’m waiting for my gravy to finish and snuck a taste of these biscuits- They are fab!
Mary Frances, you are my hero.
if the taste of the batter is any evidence, these will be BETTER than any flour biscuit i’ve ever had..
because it was what i had in my house, i used heavy cream instead of milk and didn’t use quite as much butter. the batter puffed up right quick and i can’t wait to taste them!
discovered your site through a link to the recipe, and am just delighted. i hate baking (pre-GF, packaged mixes were as far as i would go) and used GF as an excuse not to bake. and martyr myself for lack of breads and other treats.
these looked so wonderfully like Bisquick biscuits of the past, i had to give them a try. i think the recipe combined with the new (to me) stand-mixer made all the difference. easy to make up (i used buttermilk and egg), the *batter* actually tasted good, and oh my! i figured i would down the entire batch in one sitting, but thankfully they are so filling that i was over-stuffed after two. honey and butter for this batch, but next go around will probably be my favorite drop biscuit corruption, which is adding jarred mincemeat into the mix for apple and raisin and spice wonderfulness.
thanks os much for this!!
Kelly, I’m so glad that you like them. We’ve been making them every Friday morning to celebrate that the weekend is almost here =)
I just noticed that the corn starch is not included in the recipe. It should be added with the rest of the dry ingredients, right? Maybe that helps to explain the ‘batter’ consistency on some folks attempts.
@Katie: I bet you’re right. When I said “flours” in the instructions I was mentally including the corn starch because I think of it as a flour now. But that’s probably not clear to everyone. Thanks for the insight =)
Thank you for this post! I made them the other night for myself and shared them with my non-gluten free friends… they had no idea they were gluten free until i told them. I am making them again today for a pot luck. Thank you so much for your blog.
@B:
Thanks for leaving the comment! I’m so glad that everyone like them. I have a pan of biscuits in the oven as we type and I’m really loving that I get to make biscuits from scratch every week. Most people are not so lucky =)
Mary-I stumbled on your site while looking for a quick easy gf biscuit recipe. My husband has had to endure several failed attempts at making biscuits since his diagnoses. I made these for breakfast this morning and he loved them so much he ate 4 of them before complaining that he was so full he couldn’t eat another bite. Thank you so much! You are a goddess!
@April Murphy: Woohoo for Gluten Free biscuit gluttony!
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I made a half recipe and realized I did the math wrong for the milk and water. I have the dough in the fridge now so it can become more stiff. I hope they turn out alright 😉 Thanks for the recipe!! I can’t wait!
Hi,
I just found your website today. I love your recipies and can’t wait to try them out. My son is allergic to wheat, soy, eggs,all dairy, and sugar, what subsitutes can I use for eggs and dairy like butter.
Thanks for your help
Sounds amazing, I’ve been craving biscuits, but I don’t use dairy. I usually use spectrum organic shortening. Do you suppose chilling the shortening and then cutting it in would work? Thanks.
@Hannah: Shortening will be just fine in the recipe. You don’t even have to chill it first since it doesn’t melt like butter does.
@cblue: In this recipe you can substitute flax eggs for the chicken eggss (1 Tbsp. ground flax seed + 3 Tbsp. water) and vegetable shortening for the butter.
Many thanks, Mary Frances, for sharing your time this Saturday with us! Our group greatly enjoyed your demonstration, and most especially the hot, fresh biscuits! They were absolutely fabulous!
HOORAY! Gluten free, dairy free, egg free biscuits that TASTE ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE!!!!! Thanks so much for sharing the recipe. I made these for my entirely allergy free family this weekend and they were such a hit, you cannot imagine. We will definetly be making these reguraly. read-every week, maybe everyday for awhile…
Great biscuits! Just had one warm from the oven…very very delicious! I was out of butter so i used the same amount of shortening and they came out great. Thanks for sharing your recipe!!
@Rachel: I often use shortening too =)
I just made these biscuits tonight and I was so excited. I made my husband try them and he said he never would have known they were GF. I even called my mom and made her come over to try one fresh from the oven..haha! She thought they were better than regular biscuits. I made half of them the regular way and put shredded cheddar cheese in half because I used to love cheese bread pre-celiac. If you like cheese you should try it…both ways are DELICIOUS!!!
@Jessie: That’s awesome! Thanks for letting me know =)
wow, I am so excited. A friend sent me the link to here when he heard that I had a gluten sensativity and that I was going wheat/gluten free. I miss bread and biscutes so much i could cry. I am going to try these as soon as I can get the ingredients.
thank you.
Thanks for the recipe…so much better than all-rice-flour biscuits. I made them tonight and had the consistency trouble that others have mentioned. I definitely had batter, way to thin to drop onto a cookie sheet. I added more rice flour and some tapioca starch, and baked them still a little thin chilling the dough in the fridge. They are still very good, but I’m not sure why so thin. It seems like plenty of people have made them with success.
Wow! These were fabulous! I made sausage gravy with eggs, hashbrowns and these biscuits. They were so light and fluffy! Best gluten-less biscuit ever. I used the food processor for the whole operation, probably not quite as yummy as it would have been if I’d grated the butter, but easy and they turned out perfect. Thanks!
I just finished making these biscuits for the first time. To me, the batter smelled kinda funny, so I was skeptical at first. But they really are very good, definitely the closest to glutinous biscuits I have ever had. My sister-in-law is doing a gluten free thanksgiving for my husband (who is GF), and she said she couldn’t find gluten free biscuits anywhere and had given up looking. I am so glad I found these so we can enjoy biscuits during the holiday meal 🙂 Thanks for this great easy recipe.
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Mine too, ended up more like batter, but I cooked it anyway and made biscuit pancakes! 🙂 The kids thought they were great with honey on top!
I can’t do corn (or at least not a lot), so I had to use tapioca flour instead of cornstarch, and I used ground flaxseed instead of xantham gum. And sorghum flour instead of soy. Also, no dairy, so I used the Earth Balance sticks. I only froze them for maybe 10 minutes, so they didn’t grate well and ended up more at room temp by the time I got all the butter out of the grater tool I tried using. My soy milk was also room temp. Is it better to make dough with colder ingredients? I’m new to all this. One last thing is that when measuring my flours, I didn’t pack the flours down. So when I ended up with batter soup instead of dough, I tried adding more flour, packing it down this time, and found there’s quite a difference in the amounts when they’re packed! Before putting my last round of “pancakes” in the oven, I added about 1/4 cup of the ground flaxseed, let it sit for about 20 minutes, and that seemed to make it quite a bit thicker.
Not quite what I expected, but still yummy!
The xanthan gum is key to making this thick. The flaxseed how nowhere near the thickening power. In fact, it’s pretty cool to add the xanthan gum in last just to see how much it changes the texture.
You make a great point about the packing of the flour. When I measure flour I’m typically scooping it out of a canister and then shaking it off to level it.
I think baking powder biscuits were the thing I most grieved for when went GF many years ago.
The Light and Fluffy are without a doubt the best.
I made mine into a mix using dry milk powder and even replaced solid fat wit oil and used “Egg Beater” type eggs and they are great.
Thanks for your “accident” They have become a staple in our diet.
I just finished making these biscuits and I had the same problem as Farmer Bean – more like a cake batter consistency. I used the full 2 cups cornstarch and 2 tsp xanthum gum. I added more flour to thicken it. We could not eat them. They tasted awful. But our chickens loved them.
Re to the amount of liquid in recipes. From baking GF for many years, I found that it is well worth the effort to make a “mix” of dry ingredients of my favorite breads, biscuits etc and keep that on hand to adjust the balance of liquid to dry because mine vary a lot due to humidity, how I “scooped” or measured the flour etc. That way I get good results most all the time.