These Roasted Garlic Butter Biscuits Are a Little Taste of Heaven

Few things herald a great weekend, or a more formalized special occasion, like fresh, buttery homemade biscuits. And as far as I’m concerned, there’s one surefire way to level up a warm, from-scratch biscuit—and that’s to make it a garlic biscuit. You know that bread was baked with love if it’s a garlic biscuit.

By and large, garlicky biscuit recipes call for powdered garlic to be mixed into the dry ingredients. And by and large, those recipes are tasty. But do they make serious garlic lovers light up with joy? I’m not sure.

I do, however, feel fairly confident that these will.

Darcy Lenz

GET THE RECIPE: Roasted Garlic Butter Biscuits

These biscuits involve roasting an entire head of garlic, mashing the profoundly delicious contents into softened butter, and then using that butter to create a robustly garlicky biscuit dough. Sounds like a decent enough plan, right?

But first, there are just a few details I want to expand on:

If you’ve never roasted a head of garlic before, you’re honestly in for a treat. It ranks up there with browning butter in terms of heavenly aroma and utterly fantastic flavor transformation. So while yes, roasting garlic is a greater time and labor investment than, say, sprinkling some garlic powder, the deep and nuanced garlic flavor that results is fully worth it. It’s called wow factor, and these biscuits have it.

For this recipe, you’ll want to use a head of garlic that’s on the smaller side. That said, if the head of garlic you have is on the larger side, it’s not a problem. Quite the opposite actually. Proceed with roasting it per the recipe and only use half to three-quarters of the cloves in the head (you know how much you love garlicky flavor better than I do) to make your biscuits’ roasted garlic butter. Use the remaining cloves to add delicious garlicky essence elsewhere. You can incorporate it into salad dressing,  dips (like hummus!), mashed potatoes, or anywhere you suspect a hit of roasted garlic flavor would be welcome. Heck, you could even make more roasted garlic butter (or cream cheese) to spread over anything and everything.

Believe me, upon seeing that a recipe requires two separate moments of preheating the oven, my thoughts are probably similar to yours—but it is what it is with this recipe. However, I would totally recommend making the roasted garlic butter (follow through step 3 of the recipe) a day, or even a few days, in advance. Knocking this component out beforehand doesn’t take much effort and it will make the process of actually assembling the biscuits far more streamlined.

Darcy Lenz

When you get down to step 8 of the recipe (trust me, I realize the number of steps is intimidating, but none of them are particularly challenging), you may be wondering why we’re not just rolling and cutting the dough with a biscuit cutter. There are a few reasons. First, this process of gently patting out the dough and folding it over on itself, followed by patting it back out, helps to create nicely stacked, flakey layers in your biscuits. I also think folks are generally more likely to overwork the dough when going at it with a rolling pin, versus working it with their own two hands. Plus, cutting eight square biscuits from a rectangle prevents any wasted dough scraps.

You can go at this process however you please, but I find that using a ruler, as well as a bench scraper, really helpful. These tools make it easy to lift and fold thirds of the dough, and to create even biscuits, with straight edges. If that sort of thing matters to you. Realistically though, it hardly matters how they look; the wow factor will be delivered upon first bite.

I considered including cheese in these biscuits—grated cheddar, or perhaps some Gruyere. But at the end of the day, I decided I wanted to let the roasted garlic shine on it’s own. That said, if you want to experiment with adding a cheese—or something like even a few cracks of black pepper—I say go for it. I’m cheering for you. These are your biscuits and you should try what you want to!