Dylan Garofalo is a senior at Yorktown High School. He’s an aspiring journalist, and an amateur chef. While not the best chef, he spends his down time watching all the food programming he can find. He’s an especially big fan of any dish that involves bacon.

Biscuits are a staple of southern cuisine. They’re homey, flakey, and delicious. Indeed, they’re also a great conduit for the flavors of the deep south, like chicken fried steak with gravy, or barbecue. The biscuit is a delicious, starchy side dish, and everybody has a different way of preparing them. My family are particularly big fans, and as such, my mom and I decided to crack open a few Clarkson Potter cookbooks and sample biscuits from various chefs. We even made a small competition out of it, to see which one we liked best. After about ninety minutes of work, we had three batches of warm, delicious biscuits: one from Ina Garten, one from Bobby Flay, and the last one from Melissa d’Arabian.

First down the catwalk, are Ina Garten’s Buttermilk Cheddar Biscuits from Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics (Clarkson Potter, 2008).

Red Lobster isn’t a place I go to very often, mainly because the closest one is a half-hour drive away, and I’m not the biggest seafood guy. However, I still always relish a trip there, because they have the most delicious complimentary biscuits, the “Cheddar Bay Biscuits”. I think they could make a killing releasing those biscuits into grocery stores, especially considering the current economic issues that now plague their parent company. Since that pipe dream hasn’t panned out quite yet, my family and I decided to take matters into our own hands and find the closest thing.

What we found was Ina’s own Buttermilk Cheddar Biscuits, a delicious and decadent variant on the classic. It uses a stick and a half of butter (and you don’t know fun until you try and cube a stick and a half of butter without touching it so that it remains as cold as possible) and an egg. The biscuits are very buttery, flakey and delicious, and the cheddar flavor permeates the kitchen as they bake.

For this recipe we used white cheddar, though you can use whatever kind of cheddar strikes your fancy. This recipe is also the only one of the three recipes that uses an egg in the batter and an egg wash, instead of a melted butter brush on top. I enjoyed the biscuits greatly, as they’re moist and give off such a great cheddar-y flavor.

Step 1:
Dough is light and it is hard to see the white cheddar.

Step 2: Dough cuts into 8 even and generous biscuits.

Step 3: Biscuits get brushed with an egg wash and some cracks of sea salt before headinging into the oven.

Step 4: The biscuits come out lightly browned and beautiful.