Better Homemade Red Lobster Biscuits

These Homemade Red Lobster Biscuits tender with buttermilk and loaded with cheese and butter are going to become a favorite in your house to go with all your best cozy soups and stews!

Taste	Texture
Buttery, cheesy, savory	Flaky, tender, with crisp edges

Active time	Total time	Yield	Difficulty
5 minutes	30 minutes	8 biscuits	Easy

With the cost of going out to eat becoming ever sillier, it’s great to have restaurant copycat recipes that are better and actually easy to make on hand like these biscuits. We also love Copycat Outback Bread and Homemade Texas Roadhouse Rolls.

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How These Biscuits Are Different Than the Rolls at Red Lobster

The biscuits at Red Lobster that come in baskets before your meal are more of a drop biscuit. Also known as cheddar bay biscuits, these biscuits are flavored with Old Bay seasoning and plenty of delicious shreds of cheddar.

Drop biscuits are to make (mix the dough, drop it onto the baking sheet!), but they are usually made with less delicious vegetable oil or shortening vs. the butter in this recipe.

My recipe is kind of a hybrid between a drop biscuit and a more traditional biscuit like my Sour Cream Biscuits (definitely make a batch if you’re looking for sky-high flaky biscuits!). There is melted butter for convenience but the biscuits are shaped more like a craggy drop biscuit. These have a texture that’s somewhere between a traditional biscuit and a savory muffin.

Why You’ll Love Making Homemade Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits at Home

1. Easy: This dough practically makes itself. All you need to do is stir everything together, pat it out and cut the dough into pieces you roughly pat into rounds.
2. Pantry Bread: Other than the dairy ingredients, you can make this bread entirely from your pantry. If you keep culturing new batches of homemade buttermilk

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   with new milk, you’ll always have enough on hand for this recipe. Shoot, I haven’t purposely bought Old Bay in years because my kids love it so much they put it in the cart for me when they *think* we’re low!
3. Such Good Flavor: Delicious buttery cheddar, real buttermilk, and melted butter fuse together with Old Bay, dill and garlic with delicious results.
4. Better Ingredients: Every copycat recipe I’ve ever seen for Red Lobster biscuits relies on Bisquick as the base. If Red Lobster doesn’t use Bisquick, they likely use another commercial baking mix similar to it. As convenient as mixes are, they contain low quality ingredients like cheap oils, emulsifiers, and starches and other things. With homemade we can skip all these ingredients and choose better quality, better tasting ingredients.

Can I Use Pre-Shredded Cheese for Red Lobster Biscuits?

Of course. It won’t melt as nice or have as much flavor as a block of good sharp cheddar, but it is mighty convenient. Use what you have!

If you have a food processor

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, you can use the shredding disk to shred your cheese into lovely long shreds that’ll rival any pre-shredded cheese. My kids and my students love doing this! I call it the food processor

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‘s best party trick (it is!). Otherwise, just use your favorite hand grater to grate your cheese of choice.

Can I Use Self-Rising Flour for These Biscuits?

I suppose you could, though I tend to think that those flours are too salty. They’re also rarely organic and almost always bleached (though King Arthur makes a nice unbleached self-rising flour). For high altitude bakers like me, it’s almost always better to adjust the amount of leavening yourself instead of relying on standard mixes you can’t be sure of in regards to the amounts of baking powder and salt in any amount of flour. You can see my High Altitude Chocolate Chip Cookies for more technical explanations on high altitude and leavening agents like baking soda and baking powder.

I personally keep all of my leavening ingredients in one spot next to my stove where I can grab them in one go when I’m baking. The time I lose measuring them for a recipe is completely negligible.

How to Make Homemade Red Lobster Biscuits

1. Prep: Preheat the oven to 400 F (200 C).  Line a sheet pan with a piece of parchment

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   .
2. Make the Dough: Mix the flour, baking powder, dill, Old Bay, garlic powder, and salt in a bowl. Stir in the cheese.  Make a well in the middle of the flour and pour in the melted butter and buttermilk.  Quickly stir everything together until moistened.
3. Shape the Biscuits: Dump out the dough onto a counter and press any dry flour into the dough.  Fold the dough over on itself about 4 or 5 times and then pat the dough into a circle. Cut the dough into 8 wedges.  You can bake them just like this in the triangle shape for cheddar scones if you’d like.  For biscuits that look more like Red Lobster biscuits, tuck the point of the triangle back in towards the center of each biscuit to make more of a round shape.
4. Bake: Place the biscuits on the baking sheet, leaving plenty of space for rising between biscuits.  Sprinkle the biscuits with a little more Old Bay. Bake the biscuits for 12-15 minutes until they are firm and just beginning to color on the bottoms.  Eat the biscuits immediately, wrapping them in a clean napkin or towel to keep them warm.

How to Mix Up Your Red Lobster Biscuits

1. Use a Different Fat: Olive oil is equally good here.
2. Swap Out Your Cheese: These biscuits are tasty with any cheese you can shred. Monterey Jack, Gouda, Havarti, and just about every variety of cheddar are all excellent choices. Crumbly blue cheese also works well, especially if you stir in a couple handfuls of bacon crumbles.
3. Switch Out the Buttermilk: Buttermilk is critical for tender biscuits, but I rarely had it on hand until I started making it myself. If you don’t want to buy buttermilk, thin sour cream or Greek yogurt until it’s the consistency of heavy cream. Both of these will still make awesome biscuits.
4. Switch Out the Spices: If you don’t have Old Bay or don’t like it, swap it out for paprika (smoked or sweet) or your favorite BBQ rub.

How to Serve Homemade Cheddar Bay Biscuits

• Butter!: Definitely slather on the butter. They are yummy dipped in olive oil too.
• Soup: Dunk the biscuits into your favorite soup, stew, or chili.
• Topper: Bake a batch right on top your favorite chicken pot pie recipe in place of the top crust.

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