I meant know offense to my fellow food service professionals. Things may have changed in the last 20 odd years (they have been odd), but if they have the big mixer it wouldn’t be difficult to make the bisuits on site. If that’s the case I’m sure they don’t leave huge gaps between the biscuits if they’re doing it right.
I’d be interested in hearing whether any Brits on this board were confused. I’m American and I’m pretty conversant with British usage. I thought the internet kind of killed the exotic mysteries of our respective dialects, no?
I’m the Hardee’s biscuit maker. There is no machine, I make 'em from scratch.
No mixer either; I mix the dough by hand and roll it out and cut it and bake it.
With cinnamon sugar and white icing
You are missing out. I feed the people of my town an awesome breakfast everyday and customers stop me and tell me how delicious their biscuit was. (They know I made it because I’m covered head to toe in flour.) I really enjoy my crappy minimum wage job, I get a lot of satisfaction from working with my hands, and I could be a good Buddhist if I wanted to because I nourish my fellow man.
I might have been confused had I not seen this sort of argument before, so I appreciate the help for those new to the idea.
Napoleonic Army Biscuit ( in varieties of all countries then ) was different again.
You mean, hardtack?
Good for you. I’m not too snobby to admit to hitting a Hardees sometimes, probably more than is good for me. My go-to breakfast there is a Country Ham biscuit with cheese, and then a butter biscuit with strawberry jam.
I’ve always wondered why on earth Hardee’s doesn’t do more to advertise that their biscuits are handmade.
Will you come work at my local hardees? because, trust me - they could use you.
Tell them to make me an offer
You can do that easily with some doughs with no issues, but when you do it to biscuit dough, it end result is tougher and not as nicely textured. One of the biggest secrets of southern biscuit-making is to handle the dough as lightly as possible. You definitely do re-rool them, so as to not waste the dough (well, unless you are like me and just eat it raw), but you want to maximize the number of biscuits you get from the first roll by cutting them as closely as possible, so as to maximize the number of top tier biscuits.
Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s are the same restaurant. Carl’s Jr. in the west, and Hardee’s in teh east.
Hexagonal biscuits are the obvious solution. Hexabiscuits ™
I was just going to ask… is this why some places have hexagonal biscuits, or octagonal, so there’s no wasteage? Just one squish with a big hex- or octo-grid cutter, and into the oven they go?
Yes, that’s why I said what I did.
And I don’t believe that one extra rolling making any kind of significant difference in the making of biscuits. It’s one of those things that may or may not be true in theory, but is completely ignored in practice by anyone who makes them regularly. Everybody rolls them out a second time.
Ok, as soon as I can find a Hardee’s I’m going to try out the biscuits.
What I do is roll out as much dough as I can comfortably work with, cut out the biscuits as close together as I can without overlapping, then roll the scraps with the next batch. Rinse, repeat. That way there’s never more than a little trim dough in each batch. Some unnamed co-workers (cough cough Mke and Crrie) will just reroll the same dough over and over but you can tell because their biscuits sorta suck.
I used to make the biscuits when I worked for McDonald’s long ago, and that’s how I did it too. We were supposed to take the leftover scraps and roll them into a snake, then use that to line the outer edge of the biscuits on the pan to keep them soft. When the biscuits came out, employees were allowed to eat the snake. However, when it was really busy, I dispensed with the snake-making and added the excess dough to the next batch.
At the time I was working at McDonald’s, hexagonal biscuits meant we were too short-handed to make them fresh, and you were getting the frozen kind.
Next time you’re in North Carolina or Virginia, swing into the local Biscuitville. Excellent homemade biscuits, and they put the biscuit maker right up front behind a window for all to watch.
They sell a lot of biscuits.
I made my own biscuits for a long time until I realized the frozen pre-made ones were almost just as good, and a lot easier. If you want good biscuits and don’t know how to make them, stay away from the ones in the cardboard tube and go find the bag of biscuit-dough discs in the freezer section.
Also, Hardee’s does have some damn good breakfast food. Their burgers are all right, but I’m still pissed they got rid of their fried chicken. Popeye’s, Church’s, KFC, none of them are as good as Hardee’s chicken used to be. And their biscuits beat all those greasy chicken chains’.
My first real job was working at Biscuitville. I was a scrawny little 16 year old, so I wasn’t the biscuit maker. I was the fry cook. “Chicken breasts are done when they float to the top of the fryer.”
Our biscuit maker was a bossy 60-something African-American lady.
I’ve been obsessed with biscuits lately, and I’ve made countless batches using this amazing recipe: Flaky Buttery Biscuits – Window On The Prairie (I use a food processor instead of cutting the butter in by hand.)
I don’t see any reduction in quality on the second rolling, and precious little on the third. Of course, I don’t actually roll. I pat.