The Best Biscuits & Gravy You Can Buy Comes From A Popular Chicken Chain

Just about everyone from the South will tell you biscuits and gravy is one the best comfort foods you can ask for — even Dolly Parton had it for breakfast every week. What's not to love? A fluffy, buttery biscuit smothered in warm sausage gravy tastes exactly like what a hug feels like.

You can imagine, then, when we did a ranking of chain restaurant biscuits and gravy, there was a lot of tough competition. After poring through online reviews across multiple platforms, we ranked popular chicken joint Bojangles at the very top, beating out the likes of Big Bad Breakfast and Hardee's. Reviews highlighted the flaky, made-from-scratch biscuits and generous amount of sausage in the gravy, giving the dish a homemade quality that diners seemed to really love.

On YouTube, one user said he preferred the biscuits and gravy at Bojangles over Hardee's, mainly because the former's biscuits just melted in his mouth a lot more. A reviewer on TikTok said the chain's biscuits and gravy tasted better than the ones they'd tried at some really nice restaurants, while another reviewer on TripAdvisor said the dish was the closest they'd ever had to homemade at a restaurant, comparing the gravy, in particular, to their mom's. And we agree — they're good enough to earn a solid top 10 spot in our popular Bojangles menu item ranking.

A traditional biscuits and gravy recipe is pretty straightforward, comfort-food cooking, but Bojangles has its own take down to a science — and it all has to do with its biscuits. The chain uses a proprietary 49-step process to make them, with each batch baked in-store by a certified Master Biscuit Maker. While the recipe itself is a well-protected Bojangles secret, Garden & Gun was at least able to confirm one of the 49 steps: The dough is folded exactly three times. 

During a 2022 appearance on "Today in Nashville," Master Biscuit Maker Zach Goins also shared the chain's flour mix and buttermilk are gently combined by hand until the dough achieves a cottage cheese-like texture. The gentle mixing method is part of the reason why the biscuits are so fluffy; Goins explained it helps incorporate more air into the dough.

Outside of the top-secret recipe itself, Bojangles all but guarantees customers get freshly baked biscuits every time, with batches being made from scratch every 20 minutes. According to a 2016 Reddit AMA with a Bojangles biscuit maker, the chain manages to keep up with the massive demand for its biscuits by partially baking them at first, and then fully baking them within two hours just before serving. The fully baked biscuits can only stay at the storefront for a maximum of 20 minutes before they're swapped out for fresher ones. While it can't be confirmed every location practices this cycle, Bojangles does still regularly talk about its "every 20 minutes" policy.