Garlicky, salty bliss – these cheddar biscuits are homemade delight

Red Lobster is a seafood restaurant. It s right there in the name. (And yet it s not named after the crustacean of the late, famous endless shrimp d...

Red Lobster is a seafood restaurant. It’s right there in the name. (And yet it’s not named after the crustacean of the late, famous "endless shrimp” deal.) But as the chain files for bankruptcy and closes dozens of locations, the most-mourned item on the menu might not come from the ocean at all: the Cheddar Bay Biscuits, which, while we’re picking apart names, have nothing to do with bay leaves, Old Bay or any body of water, as far as I can surmise.

Anyone looking for their biscuit fix without stepping foot in a restaurant has long had access to the store-bought mix, widely available at grocery stores. The mix requires about the same level of effort as Bisquick: You add water and shredded cheddar cheese to form the biscuits, then mix the seasoning packet with melted butter to create the garlicky topping brushed on after baking.

Is the boxed mix good enough? Yes. Could I replicate it at home? Probably. Was it worth it? Absolutely. After all, the from-scratch biscuits won’t have the added preservatives and/or stabilizers of shelf-stable mixes. And there’s a pretty good chance you have all the pantry staples needed for the biscuits at home, save maybe the cheese, but if you’re anything like my family, there’s often a block of cheddar waiting in the wings.

Even developing the copycat was fairly straightforward as these things go. (It doesn’t hurt that while I’m known for my annual holiday cookie extravaganzas, I’ve gotten a reputation for my repeated biscuit work as well.) It was pretty clear the recipe could be a simple stir-and-drop cream biscuit, so I decided to use two of our archive recipes, Alex Guarnaschelli’s Cheddar Biscuits and a Cook’s Illustrated Drop Cream Biscuit from Andrea Geary, as a jumping-off point. By tweaking the ratios of the former to align with those of the latter, which also boasted a soft dough enhanced by warm cream, I was able to achieve the tall, rounded and tender biscuits I sought.

After that, it was on to the topping. I scanned the nutrition information on the side of the biscuit mix, which helpfully listed the topping ingredients separately. While there were other extraneous things in there, it was clear that garlic powder, onion powder, salt and dried parsley were all I really needed.