The Common Baking Mistake That's Ruining Your Canned Biscuits

While you can certainly just whip up a batch of biscuits to serve alongside a dish, canned biscuit dough is far more versatile than you might think — it can be a quick and easy starting point for a wide variety of recipes, from cobblers to casseroles. However, if you find canned biscuits never turn out the way you want them to, it may be because you're making one crucial mistake.

Amy Jam, co-owner of California's Bread Bros, shared mistakes everyone makes with canned biscuits in an exclusive interview with Mashed. "Don't overwork the dough!" she cautioned. "When you do, your biscuits end up tough, and who likes that?" That's because when you're shaping and rolling and arranging your biscuit dough endlessly, you're forming more and more gluten in it, which transforms the texture from tender to tough.

You might assume that since you're not making the dough from scratch, you'll side step a lot of the potential issues, but there's still room for error with canned biscuits. Jam recommends moving the pieces of biscuit dough from the can to the baking sheet as quickly as possible, resisting the urge to poke and prod and reshape them into perfect circles. A little asymmetry is preferable to a tough biscuit.

It may seem easy to minimize your interaction with the canned dough when you're making a basket of biscuits to serve alongside your dish, but what if you need the dough in the dish itself? A great tip is to avoid handling it too much with your hands. To get particular shapes, use a cookie cutter to avoid accidentally overworking it. And, for situations where you need a full layer, like a dessert with a biscuit crust or a casserole topped with a layer of biscuit dough, embrace imperfection. Instead of trying to shape and roll it into a flawless rectangle, intersperse biscuit rounds with dough scraps, creating a layer with far less actual handling — your end result is likely to be way tastier.

Of course, even if you avoid the crucial mistake of over-handling your dough, your dish still won't be any good if you're starting off with a dough you find almost inedible — to help you out, we've compiled a ranked list of canned biscuit brands, so you know which ones to look for in the store. And once you've mastered the art of baking irresistibly fluffy biscuits, don't forget to upgrade your canned biscuits to truly make them your own. You can easily do so by adding mix-ins like herbs and cheese for savory varieties, or dried fruit and citrus zest if you're whipping up a sweet treat with the biscuit dough.