How to Make Digestive Biscuits Recipe - Gemma’s Bigger Bolder Baking (2024)

FAQs

What are the ingredients in digestive biscuits? ›

Flour (54%) (WHEAT Flour, Calcium, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Vegetable Oil (Palm), Wholemeal WHEAT Flour (16%), Sugar, Partially Inverted Sugar Syrup, Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Malic Acid, Ammonium Bicarbonate), Salt, Dried Skimmed MILK. Allergy Advice: Contains: Milk, Wheat.

Keep the oven hot.

When baking buttery treats like biscuits, the key is to bake them at a temperature where the water in the butter turns quickly to steam. This steam is a big part of how the biscuits achieve their height, as it evaporates up and out.

Use Cold Butter for Biscuits

For flaky layers, use cold butter. When you cut in the butter, you have coarse crumbs of butter coated with flour. When the biscuit bakes, the butter will melt, releasing steam and creating pockets of air. This makes the biscuits airy and flaky on the inside.

Increasing the amount of butter definitely makes the biscuit "taste" softer, more crumbly, and more flaky.

Graham crackers, BelVitas, or Marie biscuits are all useful substitutes for digestive biscuits. Keep reading to get more alternatives for your dessert making.

While biscuits receive some leavening power from chemical sources — baking powder and baking soda — the difference between serviceable and greatness comes from the extra rise that steam provides. In order to generate steam, the oven must be set at a minimum of 425 degrees for at least 10 minutes prior to baking.

Whatever you do, just make sure your oven is fully preheated and hot enough. This is what helps the biscuits rise tall.

For super light, crumbly biscuits try grating or pushing the yolks of hard-boiled eggs through a sieve into the biscuit dough. This increases the fat content and slows down the development of gluten. Cookie recipes on the other hand are more likely to contain eggs. Adding moisture as well as binding the mixture.

Should you chill biscuit dough before baking? ›

But if you chill your pan of biscuits in the fridge before baking, not only will the gluten relax (yielding more tender biscuits), the butter will harden up. And the longer it takes the butter to melt as the biscuits bake, the more chance they have to rise high and maintain their shape. So, chill... and chill.

Cake flour will give you a lighter, fluffier biscuit, but the outer crust won't have as much bite to it. Conversely, all-purpose flour will provide more bite, but it'll be a drier, less airy biscuit. The solution: Use half cake flour and half all-purpose flour.

Just as important as the fat is the liquid used to make your biscuits. Our Buttermilk Biscuit recipe offers the choice of using milk or buttermilk. Buttermilk is known for making biscuits tender and adding a zippy tang, so we used that for this test.

So what's the final verdict? Butter is the winner here. The butter biscuits were moister with that wonderful butter taste and melt-in-your mouth texture. I'd be curious to test out substituting half or just two tablespoons of the butter with shortening to see if you get the best of both.

Make sure your butter is at the correct temperature – use unsalted butter softened to room temperature for creaming and cold, unsalted butter for biscuits and pastries that require butter to be rubbed into the flour.

While not packed with vitamins and minerals, if you eat digestive biscuits in moderation they can fit perfectly into a balanced diet. The fiber content can aid digestion, and they make for a better choice when compared to other cookies filled with refined sugars and unhealthy fats.

Digestive or diabetic-friendly biscuits are not calorie-free or necessarily healthy. They may contain just 15-20 per cent fewer calories than the regular variety and may encourage you to consume large portions, thinking that they are safe. Many of them are loaded with sugar.

Traditional digestive biscuits, commercially made in England and Scotland, and wildly popular (McVitie's brand is everywhere), are closely related to American graham crackers.