Which British biscuit dunks best?

I love a bourbon cream, so I wasn’t expecting a cup of tea to make me like it less. It’s a nice biscuit to eat by itself, but once I’d dunked it in Yorkshire tea, I didn’t want it. Meanwhile, the ginger nuts I wouldn’t normally choose turned out to be one of my favourite biscuits for dunking. Apparently, knowing which biscuits I like wasn’t enough.

I wanted to find the best British biscuit to dunk, rather than my favourite biscuit overall. This was definitely in the name of science and not because I wanted to try a pile of biscuits at once. The chocolate Hobnob won, but the custard cream made a very good argument for itself.

Watch my British biscuit dunking test on YouTube.

Fresh tea, short dunk, long dunk

I used Yorkshire decaf, brewed for four minutes, with a little milk and no sugar. I made a fresh cup for each biscuit because I thought the tea would get pretty gross if bits of biscuit started falling apart in it. Did I need that many cups? Probably not, but I’d decided that was how I was doing it.

Each biscuit got a three-second dunk and then a five-second dunk, counted aloud rather than timed with a stopwatch. Some cups had a little more milk than others, too. We were trying. What mattered to me was whether the biscuit held together and whether putting it in tea actually made it nicer to eat.

Chocolate Hobnobs earned their win

Hobnobs had won my community poll, and several people in the comments specified that theirs had to be chocolate. I went with McVitie’s milk chocolate Hobnobs, which I already think are fabulous biscuits on their own.

After three seconds in the tea, the biscuit had softened and the chocolate had started to melt. Five seconds seemed like a long dunk in a hot cup, but the Hobnob still held together. I got the soft biscuit and gooey chocolate without losing its structure, which was exactly what I wanted.

The milk chocolate digestive held up just as well in my test. Its chocolate tasted the same to me, but the biscuit underneath made the difference. A digestive has quite a uniform texture, while the Hobnob has more going on when you bite into it. I preferred that less uniform texture, so although the chocolate digestive was very good, it didn’t beat the Hobnob.

Custard creams came close

I bought a Tesco biscuit pack with malted milk, custard creams, bourbon creams and shortcake biscuits. The custard cream was the one that rivalled the chocolate biscuits.

I already liked it as a biscuit to eat by itself, and the tea gave me another reason to like it. The cream inside became soft and gooey, while the biscuit survived the five-second dunk with a little firmness left. It tasted good, too. I hadn’t thought about what hot tea would do to the filling, but that texture was lovely.

Malted milk was perfectly fine, particularly for a plain biscuit, though it was barely hanging on after the longer dunk. The shortcake stayed intact, but I didn’t think dunking made either the biscuit or the tea experience any nicer. Holding together wasn’t enough to make me want another one.

Ginger nuts surprised me

I’m not usually a ginger girly. Ginger in something is fine, but I don’t tend to choose it as the main flavour. I’d never bought these McVitie’s ginger nuts before, and I tried them because so many people had suggested them.

They were strong enough that I didn’t taste much tea, but the tea added a little something that I liked. I wouldn’t normally want that much ginger in a biscuit on its own, yet dunked, it was really interesting. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed it.

The bourbon cream went the other way. I normally love one away from tea, but I liked it less after dunking. Maybe the Yorkshire tea affected the cream in a way I didn’t enjoy. I couldn’t explain it, but I certainly wasn’t going to pretend I liked it.

The biscuit I wouldn’t dunk again

I expected to dislike the Tesco rich tea, and unfortunately it didn’t change my mind. After five seconds, it felt wet rather than pleasantly softened, and I found it devoid of flavour. That was the worst one for me.

So I’d choose a milk chocolate Hobnob, with custard creams close enough to deserve a place beside the tea. The ginger nuts were the surprise I was glad I’d tried. The rich teas? Does anybody want these? You should say no, by the way.