Today's haul.

The Perfect Biscuit? Kroger Had It, but Not Scratch

I'm a biscuit guy. Have been since Mom put whole trays of them into the oven about 6 a.m. daily and woke her brood of kids with their smell and that of frying bacon or sausage. Mom's biscuits were high, light and fluffy. She put together a batch in minutes cautioning against over-kneading ("Six times is enough," she often said).

I searched for Mom's fluffies for years, but finally gave up, and then Hardee's came along with a pretty good approximation. Its biscuits always tasted like they were deep-fried in butter and lightly salted (Bojangles has a similar one). I doubt if that's true, but the taste was/is good, even if that's not what your heart wants. The Hardee's and Bojangles' biscuits also introduced me to the crispy crust, which I adore. Mom's weren't crisp.

Then came the Kroger biscuit: big, crusty, fluffy inside, enormously tasty, the perfect complement to my homemade sausage gravy or to bacon, or egg, or sausage, or anything else you wanted on them. 

They were so good that I decided Thanksgiving breakfast would be preferable to Thanksgiving lunch or dinner, especially if these biscuits were at the center. So, annually, I'd invite my son's family for breakfast on Turkey Day and I'd order a dozen biscuits from the Kroger bakery guys. My son, Evan, and I would eat about six biscuits each, soaked in gravy. It was heaven.

But Kroger stopped making the biscuits a couple of years ago, breaking my heart, and my search began again.

For some time now, I've heard people recommend Scratch Biscuit on Memorial Avenue in Roanoke, an independent little restaurant with some interesting biscuit sandwich concoctions. Me? All I want is a good biscuit, so I thought I'd try it out this morning, right after my dental appointment. Clean teeth are necessary for biscuit eating in my world.

I ordered two with butter and paid $4.47 for them, quite a stiff price, I'd say. The Kroger biscuits were about 33 cents each. When I opened the Scratch bag, I noted that the biscuits were not buttered and there was no butter in the bag.

The biscuits were acceptable, if not exemplary. The exterior was just about perfectly crisp, but the inside was mushy and damp, not my idea of a championship biscuit. So, I'll keep searching.