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Gas stations across Eastern North Carolina sell heaven: big, fresh biscuits with sharp, orange cheese baked inside.They come wrapped in wax paper, and the cheese is usually close to molten.

Not a sprinkling of cheese. A hunk, completely wrapped in biscuit dough. It’s like a raw biscuit split itself open like Pac-Man, devoured a golf ball of cheese, baked itself, and puffed up to the size of a cat’s head.

In the oven, the cheese doesn’t just melt; it soaks into the flour. In a great Eastern North Carolina cheese biscuit there is a roving border between cheese and biscuit, where the two briefly become one.

Here’s the weird thing: This is an only-in-Eastern-North-Carolina delicacy. Restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations—just about anywhere east of Interstate 95 with a hot bar and breakfast hours will sell you a cheese biscuit. Lots of them will slice one open for you and add link sausage or bacon in the middle.

But ask for a cheese biscuit west of Wilson and you’ll likely get confused looks. The cheese biscuit may be the most North Carolina thing that many North Carolinians have never heard of.

I went looking for why, and—spoiler—failed to find out. No one seems to know.

Yet in the course of my search, I built a road map to some of the best cheese biscuits Eastern North Carolina has to offer, and a few others of varying quality. In one day, I tried eight biscuits from Wilson to Washington.

I found a time-honored art for sale for under $3. An art that, like so many culinary folk arts, could disappear as people run out of time and patience to practice it.

Fold In The Cheese

Long before sunlight touches Wilson, Flo’s Kitchen is the place to be. A little drive-in spot downtown, Flo’s was built on flour, lard, and buttermilk, hand rolled into something special and wrapped around cheese.

Flo was Florence Williams, Linda Brewer’s mother. Williams made the biscuits, Brewer managed the books, and together they opened this place in 1990.

“She would take a big wad of hoop cheese and fold it into the biscuit,” Brewer said.

Mama’s Country Kitchen manager Linda Dew demonstrates the proper amount of cheese. (Photo by Travis Fain)

A word about hoop cheese: It comes in wax-covered wheels. It’s made the same way as cheddar and tastes similar. The difference is moisture content, according to Josh Williams, who owns Ashe County Cheese, North Carolina’s oldest cheese plant.

By definition, cheddar has to have a moisture content of no more than 42 percent. Hoop cheese comes in a percent or so above that, so is usually eaten within a couple months of production. Hoop cheese is the standard for the classic Eastern North Carolina cheese biscuit, but plenty of good ones use cheddar cheese. Either way, bakers say the cheese should be grated fresh because the pre-shredded stuff has a cellulose coating to keep the the strands from sticking together. They say it doesn’t melt right.

Plenty of gas station cheese biscuits start life as frozen biscuit dough and a palmful of pre-shredded sharp cheddar cheese. They’re not bad. But if you’ve had the best, you notice.

Bryan Kossol, born and raised in Greenville, with no memory of ever not having a cheese biscuit, once assumed they were everywhere in North Carolina. It wasn’t until he left for Appalachian State University that he learned: “You can’t even find them in Raleigh.”

Kossol is changing the map. He is an emissary of hoop cheese. His Boone-based food truck, Everybody’s Loaded Biscuit, sells to novices, who become regulars.

“Some people look at it, and they don’t believe you that there’s cheese inside,” Kossol said. “And then they take a bite, and the cheese starts stringing out, and they’re super excited about it.”

The biscuits come on their own or sliced in half to make way for bacon, egg, or sausage. The “Fully Loaded” comes with all three. There is a long tradition of serving cheese biscuits as a sandwich.

“We put anything you want in them,” said Justin Peaden, of Peaden’s restaurant in Greenville, purveyor of one of the state’s better-known biscuits. “I’ve even had people come in and get a hamburger patty on them.”

The most popular add-on at Peaden’s: tenderloin and gravy.

“I don’t know how they eat it all,” Peaden said.

Light Rolls, Dingbatters, and Biscuits

This is a cheese biscuit story, but we need to talk for a moment about two related North Carolina staples: light rolls and the Cheddar Bo.

Somewhere around Beaufort, where Down East North Carolina begins, biscuits give way to yeast rolls. Often they have cheese baked in, and locals call them “light rolls.”

Sometimes the tourists stopping at Otway’s Outer Island General Store order a cheese biscuit, but that’s not a thing there. Visitors are clueless.

“We call them dingbatters,” Karen Willis Amspacher, executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center, said of these tourists. “The crowd from off that don’t know no better.”

“Nobody here wants a biscuit,” Amspacher said. “That’s Bojangles.”

A fresh cheese biscuit at Abrams in Pinetops, which bills itself as home to the “original cheese biscuit.” (Photo by Travis Fain)

Bojangles is arguably the biggest chain with cheese biscuits on the menu, though purists will tell you they don’t sell cheese biscuits at all. More than 100 locations, mostly in Eastern North Carolina and Richmond, sell the “Cheddar Bo,” a biscuit split open after it’s baked so that sharp cheddar cheese can be added before a second baking.

Traditionalists say the cheese must be added to raw dough to make a cheese biscuit, though they acknowledge that the Cheddar Bo often produces a tasty cheese skirt—the crispy darkened goodness that lifts off the baking sheet with the biscuit.

“It’s two different eating experiences,” Kossol said.

The Cheddar Bo is the creation of Cam and Joni McRae, a brother-sister pair who patterned their method after biscuits their mother made. Now Bojangles locations run by the Tands franchise, which the McRae family owns, sell Cheddar Bos at 56 locations.

“The goal was to try to emulate cheese biscuits that our mother made when I was little,” Cam McRae said. “We played with it. We enjoyed working in the kitchen.”

In 2015 Bojangles offered the Cheddar Bo throughout its chicken-and-biscuits empire, but the other locations “didn’t do it the way we did it, and it just didn’t work out,” McRae said.

The Cheddar Bo’s footprint shrunk considerably, fueling rumors it had been completely discontinued. But Tands-run restaurants still sell them, as do a few other franchisees.

“Our customers love it, and we continue to do it,” McRae said.

The 4 a.m. Shift

In so many Eastern North Carolina kitchens, cheese biscuits are made by women who’ve been coming to work before dawn for decades. 

Helen Keyes gets to work at Mom’s Grill in Washington by 4:30 a.m. She said she’ll be 72 this month, “if the good Lord lets me.” Keyes still works 50 hours a week, and though her biscuit-making methods can be passed on, “the younger generation is not interested in doing it.”

Brewer, who is 76, said she would have expanded Flo’s long ago if she had the staff.

“If you don’t know how to make biscuits, you might as well forget the cheese biscuit,” she said. “And it’s getting harder and harder and harder to find somebody that knows how to make biscuits.”

Delbra Powell shows off a tray of cheese biscuits just out of the oven at Abrams in Pinetops. (Photo by Travis Fain)

Others told a similar story.

“You’ve got to love it to do it,” said Ronnie Huettmann, whose Acre Station Meat Farm in Pinetown sells cheese biscuits fresh or frozen, priced at $14.99 for a pack of six.

Not everyone is pessimistic, though. Bojangles aside, Abrams restaurant in Pinetops probably sells more cheese biscuits than any other place in the state. It hails itself as home of the “original cheese biscuit.” They go through hundreds a day at Abrams, cater meetings around Eastern North Carolina with dozens more, and ship tens of thousands of frozen biscuits at Christmastime.

Delbra Powell, who works in the Abrams kitchen but says she’s technically retired, comes in many days by 4 a.m. to make biscuits. She dismisses talk of the cheese biscuit dying out.

Abrams has been in the business for nearly 40 years, and on weekends the restaurant can’t keep them in stock, Powell said.

“Those cheese biscuits,” Powell said, “they’re steady rolling.”

Travis Fain is a longtime reporter who recently left journalism for public relations. He lived in Greenville in the late 1990s and clearly misses cheese biscuits. He lives in Cary.