The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

The answer, unfortunately, is yes. But not much. Regular
biscuit dough tends to be really high in fat—a full 4 ounces
of butter for every 10 ounces of flour. The flour can’t form
tough gluten sheets as readily as it otherwise would, because
its proteins are lubricated by butter. In an oven, this is no
problem. All you’ve got to do is get your biscuits on a
baking sheet, and from there, don’t touch ’em until they’re
baked and set. In the dynamic environment of a pot of soup,
however, with bubbles simmering all around, condensation
dripping from the ceiling, and pieces of chicken jostling it
every which way, the delicate biscuit dough doesn’t stand a
chance: it’s almost guaranteed to disintegrate, turning the
broth sludgy and greasy.
The first step to modifying biscuit dough for dumplings is
to reduce the fat. I found that 6 tablespoons, down from 8,
was a good compromise, still leaving plenty of flavor but
increasing stability. This introduced a new problem, though:
with less fat, the dumplings were coming out a little dry and
dense, tougher than they should have been. I tried
increasing the amount of baking powder and baking soda,
but neither one worked—the dumplings ended up with a
strong chemical aftertaste. The easy solution? An egg.
Each of the two parts of an egg improves a dumpling
dough in its own way. The fatty, protein-rich yolk replaces
some of the fat that was lost when I cut back on the butter.
But, unlike butterfat, which starts melting and leaking out of
the dumplings at around 90°F, an egg yolk does the
opposite, becoming firmer as it is heated. Emulsifying
agents found in the yolk, like lecithin, also help ensure that
the fat stays put inside the dumplings. The egg white in this