How These Biscuits Went From Idea (to Misunderstanding) to Reality

Welcome to Bon Appétit Bake Club, a community of curious bakers. Each month senior Test Kitchen editors Jesse Szewczyk and Shilpa Uskokovic share a must-make recipe and dive deep on why it works. Come bake and learn with us—and don’t forget to join the Bake Club group chat over on Substack.

As someone who swings chaotically between type A and type B personalities, I find recipe testing especially satisfying. “Oh, why am I remaking this cinnamon bun for the eleventy-fifth time? Because I have to!” Then later that day: “Why am I adding a whole block cheese to this biscuit dough? Because I want to!”

Some recipes take many tries to perfect (Giant Cinnamon Bun). Others, like this month’s headliner Cheddar Biscuits With Old Bay, come together relatively quickly. The development timeline is hard to predict, but the goal is always the same: to offer you, the reader, a delicious result, which can be pulled off in just about any home kitchen, with any level of culinary skill. This is why we test our recipes scrupulously, always going through multiple rounds and sending it to a cross-tester to check our work. Only a handful of recipe sources across the great, wide internet can make this claim.

Since I’ve already worked on a few biscuits in my time here at Bon Appétit and throughout my career in restaurant kitchens, I used them as a starting point for my experiments. When Jesse suggested we make a Bake Club version of the famous Red Lobster biscuits (we love a chain), I requested our associate Test Kitchen manager and fellow biscuit connoisseur, Inés Anguiano, to call in a couple boxes of the mix so I could better understand their flavor profile. Imagine my surprise when I realized the “Bay” in the Cheddar Bay biscuits is in reference to an imaginary body of water. I thought they were cheese biscuits flavored with Old Bay! You know, the iconic paprika-and-celery-salt-spiked seasoning that stains seafood boils and potato chips. Instead the biscuits made from the mix were plain; my favorite part was the garlic and parsley butter brushed on top.

From there my type B personality whooshed in. I could see it clearly: a cheesy, flaky biscuit, blushing with my beloved Old Bay. The cheesy, flaky part was easy—a lot of cheese, duh, and a lamination technique. But the seasoning required some fine-tuning. In the first couple versions, I did a garlic-parsley butter wash on top of the biscuits. Then I realized this was finicky, requiring you to bring out a cutting board to chop the aromatics and a bowl or skillet to melt the butter. Nothing major but admittedly annoying after you’ve put away the dishes from making the biscuits. So I slipped these elements into the dough itself, retaining all the savoriness while making the process more seamless. I ended up calling for a brush of melted butter on top strictly for cosmetic reasons. Skip it if you prefer, but it’s okay to want to look cute!

Have you made them yet? Join our chat on Substack and let us know how they turned out.