Cooking Hardee's at home, and what its menu costs

What Hardee's food actually tastes of

Cold fat, cold buttermilk, quick hands. The layers in a biscuit come from distinct pieces of solid fat suspended in the dough - in the oven their water turns to steam and forces the dough apart where each piece sat. Warm butter smears into the flour instead and coats it, giving a dense, short, crumbly biscuit. Freeze the butter and grate it on a box grater: evenly sized cold shards, distributed through the flour in forty seconds, with far less handling than rubbing in by hand.

Fold, do not knead. Three letter folds before cutting. Each fold roughly triples the number of fat layers, so three takes you from one to twenty-seven. More than three starts developing gluten and the biscuit turns tough.

Cut straight down and do not twist. This is not superstition. Twisting the cutter drags the cut edge sideways and seals the layers together at the rim, and a sealed rim physically cannot rise - the biscuit lifts in the middle and stays squat at the edges. You can see it in the oven.

Bake them touching. Sides that touch cannot brown, which keeps them soft and makes them pull apart.

The dough should look too wet. A dry biscuit dough gives a dry biscuit, and resisting the urge to add flour is most of the skill.

What Hardee's charges, from the menu we hold

170 priced options across 59 menu sections, as last recorded in United States. Prices move and vary by outlet, so treat these as a reference point rather than a quote.

Half the menu sits between $4.59 and $9.29. Here is the whole spread:

What Hardee's charges in 6 countries

The same item, priced from each country’s own menu and converted to one currency so the columns can be read against each other. Hardee's sets prices per market, so a gap here is the chain’s pricing rather than an exchange rate artefact – and the widest gap on this list is Super Star® with Cheese, which costs $12.52 in the dearest market and $3.90 in the cheapest.