Your essential guide to dunking biscuits - Top five to try

With the trend pointing towards healthy living and eating five a day, this guide will prove indispensable to those younger readers who have little experience of dunking a biscuit in their tea, giving invaluable guidance as to the pitfalls and pleasures of dunking.

Before leaving for work of a morning, my Dad normally consumed a full pack of bourbon creams with a bucket of tea. Little wonder then that we debated the merits of different biscuits for the purposes of dunking, and we’ve come up with the following five to try.

1 Bourbon Creams
Years of research can’t be wrong. This is Dad’s tried and trusted dunking biscuit, and rarely has this little beauty spoiled that cup of tea. It’s as though these were especially engineered with dunking in mind, a porus but not too sponge-like chocolate flavoured sugar-coated twin-ply biscuit, either side of a solid mass described as chocolate fondant. The biscuit has a relatively long dunk-time whilst still keeping its slim oblong form, and the melt-in-mouth finish is a joy. The true Daddy of dunking biscuits.

2 Custard Creams
When bourbons had run out, these little fellas came off the bench and put in a fighting performance. The slightly shorter shape (more square than oblong) made for a lesser, and at times more difficult dunking experience, particularly at half-mug levels. The custard flavoured fondant wasn’t to everyone’s taste, irrespective of brand choice. After much research, my view is that the custard/tea combination can prove sickly, and in general the reduced porosity of the biscuit makes for a slightly longer dunk-time. Careful though, a few seconds too long and the whole thing will disintegrate.

3 Chocolate Hob-Nob
For many, the Hob-Nob is a dunking favourite, blending rigid and traditional disc shaped biscuits with a kind of flapjack texture, and a passable chocolate covering on one side. Therein lies the problem. It is difficult to gauge how long one of these things needs to stay submerged for, both because of whatever substance is used to bind the oats together, and the chocolate-like substance occupying one side. Withdraw the biscuit too soon and you feel cheated that tea has been repelled from biscuit, leave it too long and you’ll have oaty-bits lying in the bottom of your mug like a shipwreck.

4 Digestive
It’s hard to know how to deal with the traditional digestive. Is it meant to accompany a cheese board? For me this is an honest performer, easy to judge dunk-times and a satisfying (if bland) taste, these have been the mainstay of dunking for years, long before the Johnny-come-lately bourbons were on the scene. One digestive has been known to absorb a medium sized mug of tea in one go. Trouble is, the diameter of the digestive is such that only an oversize mug will comfortably accommodate it. You’re left trying to almost dab small sections around the circumference until the thing is reduced enough to get a proper dunk. Let these dwell too long in the mug, and there’s no going back.

5 Rich Tea
The name suggests that these were indeed engineered for dunking, but don’t be fooled. Like a small poodle, these things look harmless enough, but relax for a minute and they’ll turn on you unexpectedly. The first dunk doesn’t seem enough, so you go for a second and before you know it the biscuit has disappeared as if there were a biscuit-devouring fish in your cup. You need to be on your metal to protect that steaming cup of tea, and the taste leaves a lot to be desired. Like the Digestive, it’s as though the madman who created this monster was drinking from a bucket rather than a cup in the morning, as it is too large to enjoy in a common-or-garden mug.

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