What We Know About The 49 Steps It Takes To Make Bojangles' Iconic Biscuits

There are a few different fast food places that offer biscuits, mostly fried chicken chains like KFC and Popeye's, but none have made the biscuit so central to the experience as Bojangles. Over three-quarters of its menu items come with a biscuit, and a good chunk of them are biscuit sandwiches. So it's no surprise that this Southern staple takes the biscuit-making process quite seriously indeed. But did you know that there are a whopping 49 — count 'em, 49 — steps to take when making these flaky, buttery wonders? Bojangles is in no hurry to give away its secrets, but you can still find some of the steps if you do a bit of looking — most of them are pretty obvious.

Each Bojangles location is staffed with a Master Biscuit Maker, someone who has been specifically trained to commandeer the biscuit-making process. While, again, they're not at liberty to give every single one of the steps, there are some sensible tips to be found in what they can reveal. For instance, overworking the dough is a massive no-no, as that can result in unwanted gluten development — giving tough, chewy biscuits that fight your teeth instead of yielding deliciously. And when the time comes to incorporate buttermilk into the mixture of flour and shortening, you're looking for something with the texture of cottage cheese. Once you get there, it's time to knead, before folding the dough three times — no more, no less.

Like we said, Bojangles takes their biscuits seriously. How seriously? Not only do they make these biscuits from scratch (albeit with a proprietary flour mix), they replace the biscuits every twenty minutes so that they never go stale. A busy biscuit maker might make up to 2,000 biscuits every day, and they must abide by the 49 steps with every batch. If any of them come out looking odd or non-uniform, they can't be used.

As if that weren't enough, biscuit makers have to adjust for location, too. For instance, if they're making biscuits in a city that's particularly humid, like Mobile, Alabama, they'll have to work the dough a little more thoroughly than they would if they were working at the location in Las Vegas. This isn't necessarily something that gets spelled out, of course; rather, it's something that comes through practice, repetition, and intuition. That's the kind of attention to detail that makes Bojangles a Southern fast food chain to put on your road trip radar. And, unlike at McDonald's, breakfast is available all day at Bojangles.