Battle of biscuit bakers

Bojangles' rolls out red carpet this week for workers rolling the dough
By Kathleen Purvis - kpurvis@charlotteobserver.com

"That man's got some beautiful biscuits."

There are not many places you'd hear one man say that about another. But Thursday, that place was the hallway of Bojangles' corporate offices off Arrowood Road in Charlotte.

In Bojangles' World, this is Biscuit Week, when the winners of biscuit challenges at stores in 10 states come to Charlotte to show they've got the white stuff.

Out of 15,000 employees, 15 make it to the Master Biscuit Maker Challenge. Thursday's seven contestants were from North and South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

The Bojangles' head office rolls out the red carpet for them. Literally: A red carpet is rolled over the sidewalk before the competitors are ferried from their hotel in two Bojangles' Humvees with flashing lights and sirens.

Workers from all over the building crowd into the lobby to blow horns and spin noisemakers. Then they line the hall outside the test kitchen to watch through a window as each competitor steps up to the workbench to demonstrate mastery of Bojangles' biscuit procedure, called the Position Observation Checklist.

Everyone at Bojangles', from vice presidents to franchise owners, knows how to follow it. In the hallway as they watch, their voices are as reverent as weekend warriors at the Masters.

A wincing "ooooh!" comes from the crowd when a baker raps out four biscuits without dipping a cutter in flour: Regulations call for a dip every three raps. One woman draws a comment when she lifts biscuits without using her thumb: "She's got the old-school way," before the thumb prohibition was lifted.

Inside the test kitchen, judges wearing black-and-white striped referee shirts fill out an eight-page checklist, covering every moment from when 5 pounds of biscuit mix and a jug of buttermilk go into the bowl until the final pan of biscuits is pulled from the oven, checked against a color chart and delivered to a judge with the cry, "Hot Bojangles' Buttermilk Biscuits!"

There is a reason for the obsession with precision, says franchising vice president Tony Hopson.

Partly, it's consistency: How do you make every biscuit perfect when a store might make 800 to 1,200 a day? But the procedure has other advantages, including efficiency, speed and waste reduction.

After all, when the biscuit shift starts at 4 a.m., you really do need to know how to do it in your sleep.

So the checklist covers exactly how you touch your dough (six times, in a clock-face pattern), how you fluff your biscuit mix in the bowl (six to eight times, so you don't overwork it), and how pans go in the oven (top to bottom, so you always know which pan went in first).

Every station has two rolling pins, including one with metal discs by the handles to make sure the dough is exactly the right depth.

Biscuits are always placed on the pan in the same pattern: top left, bottom left, then working toward the middle until the last biscuit is tucked in as sweetly as a sleepy child.

Each competitor has to make 50 biscuits in less than 5 minutes. The winner gets $1,000, plus $200 or $300 more from their store. They all get black aprons and caps with the "Master Biscuit Maker" legend.

Thursday's winner: Lynnae Elkins, 20, of Moneta, Va., who was making her first trip to the finals. She made her 50 in less than 4 minutes, 30 seconds.

No one at the finals, from vice presidents to the bakers, would admit making biscuits at home, unless they're from a can you whack against a counter.

"In all honesty, it's a mess," said Charlotte employee Mark Oshefsky. "Biscuits are a mess."