Cheddar Scallion Biscuits
These all butter (no shortening) Cheddar Biscuits are soft, flaky, and tender. The flavor is rich with tangy buttermilk, sharp cheddar, and green onion. They are also crisp on the edges and fluffy in the middle. That’s my ideal biscuit, and they are wonderful alongside a piping hot bowl of Quick Chicken Noodle Soup!
These are exactly that, but then you add gooey, sharp cheddar cheese and a little bit of green onion to make the flavor even better.
This biscuit flavor combination is one I’ve been making for years, and it’s good enough to eat on its own, but can also compliment nearly any dinner spread.
Biscuits have a bit of a difficult reputation, maybe not as bad as Pie Crust, but they’re a lot easier to pull off than people think.
The most important thing to remember is to use a light hand to keep yourself from overworking the dough.
Because biscuits puff up quite a bit in the oven, they’re very forgiving.
They can go into the oven looking a bit shaggy, but they end up baking into flaky layers that give biscuits their visual appeal.
How to Make Cheddar Biscuits:
As you can see in the how-to video above, these biscuits are easy to make.
And quick too! It only takes 10 minutes to make the dough, and another 10 minutes to bake in the oven.
You can also freeze unbaked biscuits for a later dinner, then simply bake them any night you’d like. They are great along numerous dishes like Shrimp and Sausage Jambalaya, Easy Chicken Marsala, and Roasted Pork Tenderloin.
Garlic Knots, English Style Scones, and Pumpkin Muffins are some of my other favorite recipes to bake. Enjoy!
Cheddar Scallion Biscuits
Ingredients
- 6.25 oz flour, by weight (1.25 cups, if measuring)
- 1.25 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 4 tbsp unsalted butter cubed
- 4 oz cheddar cheese grated
- 2 scallions sliced
- 1/2 cup buttermilk
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
- Whisk to combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
- Add the cubed butter, and break it down with your fingertips, working it into the dry ingredients to coat the little butter pieces with flour (see video if needed). When the butter has been smushed down into large flakes, stir in the cheddar and scallions.
- Pour in the buttermilk, and toss everything around, thinking of moistening the dough and distributing the liquid instead of working or overstirring the dough. The dough should be relatively clumped together.
- Flour your countertop lightly and gently pat and roll the dough out into a circle or rectangle. Use a biscuit cutter to cut out little biscuits (or, just cut it up into square pieces).
- Place the biscuits on a parchment or silicone mat-lined baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes. Enjoy!!!
Notes
Nutrition
Nutrition is estimated using a food database and is only intended to be used as a guideline for informational purposes.
Post updated in April 2019. Originally published August 2011.
74 Comments on “Cheddar Scallion Biscuits”
This might be a bit long of a comment! But I realized a review for this recipe is long overdue. I found this recipe when I was starting to get really into cooking and baking, as a hobby rather than a chore. Within several months of this, I had developed an extremely rare medical condition (Median Arcuate Ligament Syndrome) that caused extreme, disabling pain every time I ate. I lost 1/3 of my body weight in 2 months, and had no idea what was going on. I wanted to eat, but I couldn’t without doubling over in pain. I made these biscuits once a week and would get through as many as I could before the pain would hit. These and those nutritional beverages literally got me through and kept weight on until I was able to get major surgery (11 days before my masters thesis was due), in December 2020. To get this surgery, I had to make several trips from DC to Connecticut, and when I wanted to show that I was grateful, I made these biscuits. For my friend who drove with me for a test, for my parents who moved to Connecticut for a month to comply with COVID safety and my surgeons orders to stay in the area. For my doctors and nurses, even. And I kept making these biscuits, for every big family meal (seeing family for the first time in 4 years, I made biscuits!) or every time I wanted to show my love and gratitude for my friends. When my long distnace partner visited me from Canada and we spent our first nights together, I sent her back on the plane with a fresh batch of these. When my friend got a life altering diagnosis and needed help moving last week, I brought her a batch of these biscuits. People ask me to make “my cheddar biscuits” a lot. It’s been 5 years and some change, and now I am a PhD student, and I make a double batch of these and freeze them every couple weeks, and I have them for breakfast. When I’m in a rush, I have a meal. When I’m too caught up in some exciting work, I have a meal. When I want to take care of my friends and partner, I have a warm hot meal. When I get home a little drunk and realize I haven’t eaten, I have something to eat. And I never expressed my profound gratitude for this recipe. I use it so often I have it memorized, and I realized I never left a review. In my opinion, this is the best recipe I have ever found, and I will never go more than a few weeks without making it, and I love passing it around to all of my friends and family.
I sometimes use buttermilk powder, and I highly recommend grating frozen butter sometimes over slicing and pressing in slivers of butter. I definitely recommend making a double batch and freezing them for fresh, delicious biscuits anytime. And I really recommend you bake some and have them with some people, and food, that you love.
WOW! Thank you for sharing this. Im so glad these helped you in such a challenging time. I will never look at these biscuits the same. I wish you so much success in your phD program and beyond. Cheers to the Corbin Biscuits!
Hi Joanne –
Thankyou very much for the recipe for peach pie. It looks very tasty and we are looking forward to that . Enjoy your week. M.
I agree with comments below that this is way too salty, the dough was also too crumbly to work with, needed an extra 1/4cup of buttermilk.
Turned out amazing! Do you think it would work to add some sourdough starter to these??
These were delish and very easy. I baked mine another 2 minutes bc they weren’t quite browned enough and turned out perfect. Thank you!
This was great. I added corn, paprika, and a good amount of black pepper. Just a note: I used less than half the salt, but still found it salty. I guess it depends on what kind of cheddar you use. Also, if I were to make it again, I would double or maybe even triple the recipe. It’s simple enough but for the amount of cleanup I would rather have more than 8 biscuits (and you’re gonna want more anyways).
I make these all the time! I always add extra onion and cheese, but even without my additions they are so good. This is my go-to biscuit recipe for sure.
What size biscuit cutter do you use? Would grating cold butter on a large size grater and using a hand held pastry blender to mix it in with the flour work? My hands are very warm (I never had to wear gloves even in Wisconsin winters)and when I handle mixing flour and butter bits with my hands the butter quickly melts and it ruins the flakiness resulting in hard biscuits.
I just tried this recipe for the first time and it was so easy! I double the cheese and green onions, and they came out perfect. Thank you for sharing this recipe!
what can we use in place of buttermilk?
Lily, I’ve replaced buttermilk before in a muffin recipe by using plain yogurt mixed with water. So for example, if recipe calls for 1/2 cup buttermilk, I’d use 1/4 cup (or more) of yogurt and stir in water to equal 1/2 cup. It didn’t affect the flavor of the muffins.
Absolutely delicious! I quadrupled the recipe and made part of it without scallions. But holy cow, they’re amazing. Definitely will come back to this in the future.
These are fantastic! I doubled the recipe using half AP flour and half WW flour (all I had at the time), whole milk with lemon juice and 6 scallions. Baked 1/3 and froze the remainder; the frozen ones took 2 mins more to cook but rose even higher than the room temp ones! Thanks for a wonderful recipe, Joanne!
Hi Rebecca, thanks for sharing your variations, very helpful! Glad they turned out well.
Over the last few weeks I’ve made this recipe 10+ times and it’s so good. The first few times I made it exactly as described, and it’s perfect. Then we ran out of buttermilk so I used 2% and lemon juice – still came out great. Another time we were out of butter and used shortening – still great. We also ran out of scallions and used dehydrated onions. At some point I got lazy and started adding an extra tablespoon of milk and made them like drop biscuits- still great. This is an awesome, versatile recipe.
Thanks for sharing Erin. Really helpful to hear about your variations!
I found the recipe to be a tiny bit too salty. My scallions might have been on the smaller side and my cheese very sharp, but I would have doubled the scallion to keep up with the cheese.
Just made it this morning for the family and we all love it! Best biscuits ever! I didn’t have buttermilk on-hand so used buttermilk substitute (1/2 cup whipping cream and 1 tbsp white vinegar). Thanks for sharing your recipe.