What's The Difference Between Cookies And Biscuits?
To a lot of folks, the cookie and the biscuit exist in entirely different culinary spaces. A gooey chocolate chip cookie pulled fresh from the oven, is an excellent way to satiate your sweet tooth. On the other hand, a warm and flaky buttermilk biscuit is a savory snack that can be enjoyed with breakfast or dinner, best paired with a generous pour of piping hot gravy.
Though you may have two very different images in mind when you're picturing cookies and biscuits, the distinction between the two foods isn't always so clear. Eurocentres tells us that a lot of sweet treats that an American might call a cookie would be referred to as a biscuit by the kind chaps over in the U.K., though there are just as many baked good varieties that the English also label cookies. However, the real comparisons between cookies and biscuits go beyond cultural etymology.
Cookies are chewy and biscuits are brittle
According to Waterbridge, the primary way to tell the difference between a cookie and a biscuit is by texture. Cookie dough is soft, resulting in an almost cakelike consistency in the final product, while biscuit dough is much harder so that the biscuit will bake into a dry, crumbly dessert snack, perfecting for delicately dipping into a cup of coffee or tea. British Essentials lists ten biscuits that pair well with tea, and nearly all of them are crispy. If you're looking to boil down the tea time experience into a single snack, try these Earl Gray Shortbread Sugar Cookies.
Additionally, Instant Brands notes that cookies and biscuits are different in terms of ingredients. A standard shortbread cookie recipe doesn't call for any leavening agents, making it the kind of crumbly treat that could be called a biscuit. A biscuit is even and the firm exterior is ripe for adornment, while a cookie's dense dough allows for mix-ins, like nuts, or chocolate chips.
The etymology of cookie and biscuit
The term 'cookie' is applied generally to a wide variety of baked goods in the U.S. However, Vox tells us that in the bulk of the English-speaking world, while biscuit is used to describe a subset of crispy treats, a big, gooey, American-style chocolate chip would still be called a cookie.
Instant Brands explains that the word cookie is derived from a Dutch word, 'koekje', which means little cake. Koekjes were small chunks of dough used by pre-industrial bakers to gauge the temperature of an oven before baking. The term biscuit is Latin in origin — the prefix, bis, means twice, and coquere is Latin for cooked. Twice-cooked is an appropriate moniker for these crispy snacks.
If taste and texture don't clue you in to which treats you're enjoying, you can always listen to how your cookie crumbles. Paul Hollywood, of "The Great British Baking Show" fame, insists that a quality biscuit will always break with a resounding snap, via Atlas Obscura.