Maple Bacon & Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits

If there’s one thing we love here in The Chunky Chef household, it’s bread. We love it in all forms, but my personal favorite is biscuits.

So buttery and fluffy, and just begging for some softened butter to be slathered all over them!

But sometimes they can be a pain to make. My Buttermilk Biscuits are absolutely delicious, but the dough needs to be strategically folded and cut out.

One thing I love about these maple bacon and cheddar biscuits is that there isn’t any rolling out of the dough, no careful folding or cutting, or anything fussy.

Just mix, scoop, and bake!

Plus, they’re the perfect blend of sweet and savory, with little morsels of bacon and cheese throughout.

How to make maple bacon and cheddar biscuits?

This is just an overview; the full ingredients and directions are in the recipe card toward the bottom of this post.

1. Cook bacon. You can do this in any way you’d like, but you’ll want to drain the bacon on a paper towel, and reserve some of the grease.
2. Cut fats into dry ingredients. I like to add the dry ingredients to my food processor, then add the chilled butter and bacon grease and pulse a bit, until pea-sized lumps appear.
3. Cut in cheese and bacon. This just takes a couple of pulses.
4. Transfer to bowl and add liquid. Make a little well in the center and pour in cold buttermilk.
5. Stir and scoop. Once mixed, scoop out dough onto baking sheet.
6. Bake and brush. Bake until golden, then brush with melted butter mixture.

Variations of this recipe

• Self rising flour – if you have self rising flour, you can use it for this recipe! Just omit the salt and decrease the baking powder to 1 1/2 tsp.
• Buttermilk substitute – if you don’t have buttermilk on hand, you can make your own! Mix 1 Tbsp lemon juice or white vinegar with whole milk and let it sit about 10 minutes. It will look a bit curdled. Stir and use.
• Drop biscuits – I like to use a cookie scoop to get evenly sized biscuits, but if you don’t have one, you can use a greased 1/4 cup measuring cup or two spoons, to drop the biscuits down on the baking sheet. This will give the biscuits a craggy appearance on top, with plenty of peaks that get nice and crunchy.
• No bacon grease – if you don’t want to use the bacon grease, you can use an additional 2 Tbsp of butter in it’s place.
• Cheddar type – normally, I talk about how important it is to shred your own cheese (especially for a mac and cheese recipe), but here it’s not all that important. Pre-shredded will work just fine. We like to use a medium or sharp cheddar.

Making biscuits ahead of time

I found that making the dough ahead of time didn’t work as well, since the leavening agents (specifically the baking powder), will start activating as soon as the ingredients are mixed. This means when the biscuits are baked, they won’t rise as much as they should.

But this dough comes together so quickly, you’ll probably have them mixed up before your oven even preheats!

Freezing

This biscuit dough can be frozen as well!

Place the scooped biscuits dough balls on a wax paper lined baking sheet and freeze for 1-2 hours, or until hard. Then transfer the frozen biscuits to a freezer safe container and freeze for up to 3 months.

Storage

Biscuits should be stored in an airtight container at room temperature and eaten within 3 days. They can also be refrigerated for up to 5 days.

To reheat leftover biscuits, bake at 300°F for about 10-12 minutes, then brush lightly with melted butter to give them that “just baked” taste.

These biscuits are absolutely delicious on their own, but if you want to take them to the next level, try drizzling them with honey or honey bacon glaze!

Recipe was originally posted in June of 2015, but has been updated in June of 2023 with new photos and additional information.