Ina Garten's Trick For Avoiding Clumpy Cheese In Your Biscuit Dough
When it comes to Sunday dinner, nothing beats good old-fashioned, fluffy homemade biscuits baked to perfection, And if they are still warm when they hit your mouth, all the better. Biscuits may seem a little intimidating to make, but King Arthur Baking's encouraging words should be a salve for would-be biscuit bakers. The baking site shares that biscuits can be "simple" to make. Once you conquer your fears and embrace some simple tips, you are left with a mouthful of deliciousness.
That said, "light and airy" biscuits do require some attention to detail. That includes ensuring you keep your cold ingredients cold and not touching your dough more than it needs to be touched to avoid the risk of a "tough" end product. One challenge you may have encountered when making cheese biscuits is clumping cheese. The struggle is real, and when you make cheese biscuits, it's the last thing you want. All that grated cheese needs to be spread out evenly among all your beautiful biscuits, not globby or concentrated in a few areas. Luckily, Ina Garten, AKA the Barefoot Contessa, has a trick to help prevent this baking mishap.
Flour is your friend
During an episode of her Food Network cooking show, '"Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics" (via YouTube), Ina Garten shared a tip while making her recipe for buttermilk cheddar biscuits. Garten revealed that if you mix your cheese with a little bit of flour to coat the grated shreds, you can elude the clumping club. Easy enough, right? The site Pantry and Larder says that ingredients like flour provide a barrier to guard against moisture so the cheese doesn't get "sticky" and form those clumps. The blog also shares that lightly covering the cheese with flour in no way will change the flavor of the cheese.
Bon Appétit goes further to explain the thickness of grated cheese shreds can influence clumping. This is largely due to an increase in surface area, which creates a greater likelihood of clumping. That also lowers the likelihood of the cheese melting evenly, possibly leading to globby masses. To curtail this problem, the magazine recommends keeping you size of your grated cheese "small" and the same size.