The Best Thing to Do with Your Biscuit Scraps

As an Alabamian who moved to New York City 15 years ago, I get asked about biscuits a lot. My advice is always the same: Buy the right flour (soft white winter wheat if you can, cake flour if you can’t), keep everything very cold, and don’t overwork the dough. But now, thanks to Atlanta’s “biscuit jedi,” Erika Council, I have another good tip: Put your slab of dough on your baking sheet, cut out the biscuits but keep the scraps around the biscuit rounds, and then bake the whole thing, scraps and all.

This method, which Council posted about on Twitter and Instagram, is wildly clever for a couple reasons. First, it means you don’t need to re-roll out the biscuit dough to punch out another few biscuits. The more you work the biscuit dough, the more gluten forms, meaning that you get tough, rather than tender, biscuits. Second, it means that you have glorious little baked biscuit end scraps, which are fantastic for scooping up gravy or just snacking on. I tried it at home and loved it so much I may never make biscuits another way.

“I learned this trick watching my great uncle and grandmother make biscuits growing up,” Council wrote in an email to Food & Wine. “My great-grandmother ‘Big Mama’ was the person they learned the trick from. Although they didn't see it as a trick, more so just not being wasteful. And they didn't care too much for square biscuits.”

Council knows her way around a biscuit, that’s for sure. She runs Bomb Biscuit in Atlanta, a biscuit-centric pop-up turned storefront bakery. In 2020, amid the pandemic, Council rolled out a delivery option that allowed Atlantans to order a box of buttermilk biscuits to be dropped off at their door.

Next time you make biscuits, forget the re-rolling and cutting out, and just bake the slab whole. Those extra biscuit scraps won’t go to waste.