Many biscuit recipes caution against over-working the dough. I've read recipes that insist you only stir 15x after adding the milk and others that say you should knead only 5-10x. The idea is that too much kneading will make the biscuits tough, hard, and nasty.
Usually I mix just until the ingredients are combined, then knead 5 times. But to see if this is really necessary, I made three batches:
I could definitely tell after 15 kneads or so that the dough was changing. It got harder to fold, stiffer, more "bready". By the time I got to 45 kneads, they dough was fighting me as hard as any bread dough. The gluten was going crazy in there. I was sure that I had "ruined" that particular batch of biscuits. Turns out I was wrong.
But then, as a few people reminded me, it is possible that even five kneads is too much. What if all three of these batches were "ruined" in comparison with the glorious fluffiness I could have had if I handled the dough even less? To make sure this wasn't the case, I performed one more experiment. This time I made only two batches of dough:
At this point, I thought I had settled the matter: over-working the dough is not something you need to fret your head about.
To shape the "no knead" dough, I stirred the ingredients with a fork until they were barely combined, dumped the dough on the table, shaped it carefully with my hands, and folded it one time to give it at least a semblance of cohesiveness. I then baked both batches (along with some canned Pillsbury biscuits my wife had left over in the fridge) together at 425 F for about 20 minutes.
What was the final result? Well, both the "no knead" biscuits and the 5x kneaded biscuits tasted really good. If you just took a bite of one, it would be hard to tell the difference. No one at breakfast (and there were 7 of us) said they preferred one over the other. But there were some differences in the shape of the biscuits.
So what's the conclusion? In my mind, these experiments pretty much debunk the overworking paranoia you see from a lot of biscuit makers. Kneading your biscuit dough a few times will not stop your biscuits from rising... in fact, they tend to rise higher the more you knead them (although if you knead them much more than 15x, they will get less crumbly and very slightly more spongy). So go forth and knead, 5x, 10x, 15x... anywhere in that range will give results that are almost indistinguishable. Even if you can't help but knead the dough until it begs for mercy, don't expect your biscuits to be ruined... just expect them to be a bit more hom*ogenous, spongy, and Pillsbury-ish.
