Cinnamon ‘N’ Raisin Biscuits are also customer favorites. Hardee’s recently ended a promotional offer with iced blueberry biscuits and a recurring limited-time offer with a Hillshire Farms sausage link served on a biscuit.

Biscuit making is a specialized skill at Hardee’s. Not everyone can do it. Biscuit-makers start mixing and rolling dough by hand each morning at 4 a.m. Biscuits bake throughout the breakfast daypart. No biscuit older than 20 minutes is served. “Today no one would ever decide to make biscuits from scratch,” Haley says. “It’s such a complicated process and requires such special training and specialized staff that no one would decide to do it in a quick-service environment. But it has become such a part of our culture that we’re wedded to it.”

So entrenched is the scratch biscuit in Hardee’s culture that its in-store bakers compete each year to be named National Biscuitmaker Champion. Lisa Smith from a Greenfield, Indiana, store won last year. Hardee’s breakfast tray liners now feature a photo of her smiling face.

A Lot to Crow About

Jack Fulk, co-founder of Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ‘n Biscuits, was a Hardee’s franchisee in rural North Carolina in the 1970s. According to his biscuit story, Fulk introduced the biscuit to the Hardee’s menu.

Fulk sold his 15 Hardee’s units and started Bojangles’ in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977, taking his biscuit recipe with him. But Bojangles’ did not originally serve biscuits either. Fulk took the time to refine his recipe, adding a proprietary (and secret) “biscuit magic” to the dough. When the biscuit finally made an appearance at Bojangles’ sales shot up 60 percent virtually overnight, according to company lore.

Like Hardee’s, Bojangles’ employs bakers to create buttermilk biscuits from scratch on-premises, but bakers at Bojangles’ work throughout the day—to the tune of an estimated 500,000 biscuits per day systemwide. The company also hosts an annual baking competition.

The biscuit-maker position at Bojangles is one of the most coveted and demanding jobs at each of the restaurant’s 376 locations. Like Hardee’s, the Bojangles’ stronghold is the Southeast. The region’s taste for biscuits means a biscuit-maker might turn out 200 to 300 fresh biscuits every 20 minutes.

In fact, rare is the fried-chicken concept that doesn’t feature biscuits riding shotgun on the menu. The world’s largest chicken chain, KFC, has carried buttermilk biscuits all over the world. Thanks to Church’s Chicken, honey-glazed biscuits are being served in the Middle East. Popeyes made recent news with the introduction of a zero-gram trans fat biscuit.

Back to the Table

So, why does a simple baked good hold such a sacred place in our collective foodways?

Art Smith, personal chef to Oprah Winfrey for more than 10 years and author of Back to the Family: Food Tastes Better Shared with Ones You Love, says America has always had a love affair with biscuits.

“We find comfort in biscuits because they look like home and taste like it, too,” Smith says. “To me, growing up in northern Florida on a tobacco farm, biscuits say home.”

Smith notes that many Americans were raised on the packaged biscuit mixes introduced in the 1930s, such as Bisquick and Jiffy, to which a home cook added only milk or water. In 1952 the heat-and-serve biscuits in the tube by Pillsbury hit stores. Today, it’s the exceptional cook who makes biscuits from scratch.