Wheat flour makes better biscuits than cassava or rice flour

Biscuit baking is one of the trickiest things I've ever attempted to do. One bad experiences a few years back and I haven't tried to do it again. If you're not paying attention when you're making it, you can mix, roll, bake and still end up with poor results. I wasted an entire afternoon last harmattan season trying to find a suitable replacement for cassava flour because the regular flour was out of stock at the market near my house. The result was what I wanted at all. It was so bad my sister didn't even want to try it. She was afraid she'll get diarrhea after eating it. You can't blame her, it looked terrible. But the biscuit is not what I'm here to talk about for today, it's the most common ingredient everyone uses to make it, wheat.

Wheat flour has a unique ability that the other flours simply don't have. It contains a protein called gluten which, when dough is kneaded, gives the biscuit both height and tenderness. Neither cassava nor rice flours nor the composite mixtures of the two have this property.

A right wheat biscuit when pulled apart, will separate in layers. Experienced bakers will recognize this as the result of a good mix between fat and flour in the oven. The flour is what gives the structure to the biscuit but in a way that is soft and tender which to me are two usually contradictory characteristics of a biscuit.

I see it as one of those moments in a recipe when the ingredient is the reason and not the tradition. Wheat doesn't win as most common ingredient by default, it is preferred by most bakers because of what it does.