Rise & Shine

Shreveport's Kanya Michelle is living proof that a great biscuit can change your life.

by

When an early pandemic lay-off inspired Kanya Michelle to launch her home-based bakery, Shreveport Cottage Homestead, she started out making old-fashioned holiday pies and scones. But then, she noticed a gap in the world of small-scale specialty bakeries: handmade buttermilk biscuits. “There were already a million people in Shreveport making pies and all of these things, but no one was specializing in biscuits,” she said. “It was kind of surprising. A good buttermilk biscuit is a staple of Southern cooking, but they’re getting harder and harder to find.”

Two years later, with her recipes wholly developed, Kanya officially relaunched her business in the summer of 2022 as Shreveport Biscuit Company. Since then, she’s emerged as one of the star vendors at Shreveport Farmers’ Market, where her towering, Instagram-ready biscuit sandwiches have on occasion attracted an hour-long line of customers. Shreveport Biscuit Company has also released several varieties of frozen, ready-to-bake biscuits that are currently sold by local marketplaces and gourmet grocers in Shreveport, Haughton, Lafayette, Metairie, and New Orleans. With her biscuit-making operation rapidly outgrowing her kitchen, she moved into a commercial production space last September, hired her first employee in the spring, and has been looking at real estate for a potential brick-and-mortar location. 

Kanya Michelle's biscuits are somehow dense and pillowy at once, tall, crisp-crusted, and outlandishly buttery without being greasy or falling to pieces. Each biscuit half is as substantial as a slab of focaccia, so they stand up well to toppings—making the way for Kanya’s regular releases of seasonal biscuits that incorporate “just about every fruit” as well as herbs, cheeses, and more. Her biscuits-as-strawberry shortcakes are especially popular during the scorching summer months. Blackberries (which she uses in her top-selling biscuit) “belong in a biscuit; they come out almost cobbler-like.” Peaches? “Not so much.” On the savory side, there are Kanya’s Louisiana-made kimchi and cheddar biscuits, as well as the cheese-and-pepper variety, which features minced jalapeños mixed into the dough while they’re “still kind of raw, so they retain their fruitiness.” Asked to name her personal favorite, Kanya appointed her blackberry biscuit stuffed with good, local breakfast sausage—a combination of sweet and savory flavors that “hits every biological craving note.” 

“There were already a million people in Shreveport making pies and all of these things, but no one was specializing in biscuits,” she said. “It was kind of surprising. A good buttermilk biscuit is a staple of Southern cooking, but they’re getting harder and harder to find.”

In conceiving of her recipes, Kanya sources her ingredients with care and frequently teams up with other small Louisiana food businesses, creating small-batch releases more in the style of a craft brewery or streetwear company than a bakery. Recently, for example, she collaborated with Lafayette’s Bougie Bologna to create the “Bougie Biscuit”. She’s also collaborated with several local woman-owned small businesses like Sweetport, Good Granoly , Moonlight Harvest Mushrooms, and Special Reserve Coffee Roasters. She’s served a biscuit Monte Cristo and draped a buttermilk biscuit with rainbow-shaped sprinkles for Pride month. These aren’t your grandmother’s buttermilk biscuits—except when they are.  

According to Kanya, the key to making great biscuits is incorporating the butter into the dry ingredients correctly. She chills her butter in the freezer before using a handheld cheese grater (“Not a box grater, but a grater with a handle—it’s a total gamechanger.”) to shred the butter into the flour mixture. She stores her mixing bowl in the freezer between batches, which keeps her biscuit dough cooler and makes it easier to handle. If she adds other ingredients to a batch of dough, such as macerated berries or kimchi, she chills those ingredients as well, all in an effort to prevent the butter flakes from dissolving. Preventing the butter from melting, she said, “gives you even pieces of butter that produce moisture, flakiness, and pockets as the biscuit bakes.”  

Kanya doesn’t quite feel like a chef, she said, but she doesn’t deny her well-earned expertise on biscuits. “It took me a good, long time before I felt like I had a solid footing,” she said. “It’s something that you can only really learn through repetition.”   

Growing up in the Ozarks of southern Missouri and Arkansas, Kanya’s family typically ate canned, “pop-can” biscuits. She made her first buttermilk biscuit less than five years ago. She doesn’t have a passed-down family biscuit tradition or fond memories of rolling out biscuits while holding onto her grandmother’s apron strings. Before moving to Shreveport, she’d spent much of her adult life in Hawaii and New Jersey—not places exactly well-known for their biscuit cultures. In the early days of Shreveport Biscuit Company, she struggled with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and self-doubt. But the relationships that she’s established with customers, market organizers, and other Louisiana food entrepreneurs have helped her gain confidence and stay laser-focused on growing her business.  

“My friend group has become filled with women like me, small business owners who are trying to do more and are capable of doing more,” she said. “I feel really grateful for the couple of years of chaos that we all just experienced, for the way it all panned out. Five years ago, I’d never made a biscuit. Now, I can’t imagine doing anything other than making biscuits for the rest of my life.”  

Shreveport Biscuit Company’s frozen, ready-to-bake biscuits can be purchased at local marketplaces and fine grocers across Louisiana, including Sunshine Health Market in Shreveport, Mahaffey Farms and Station 80 in Haughton, The Market at Tops in Lafayette, Laughing Buddha Nursery in Metairie, and The Rabbit’s Foot in New Orleans. For updated information on retail locations or to subscribe to the Shreveport Biscuit Company newsletter, visit shreveportbiscuitcompany.com.