BIND servers will typically ship with a factory-default hint zone like this:

zone "." {
 type hint;
 file "db.root";
};

You’ll see this db.root file contains a static list of the 13 root servers.  It gets the job done, but since recursive queries always go out to the root servers, it’s not ideal.

A better solution: download the complete database from the root servers themselves:

zone "." {
 type slave;
 masters {
  198.41.0.4;
  192.228.79.201;
  192.33.4.12;
  199.7.91.13;
 };
 file "root.cache";
};

This file is roughly 2 MB and will take a few seconds to transfer, but helps deliver much more consistent lookup times since it hits the TLD servers directly without first bouncing off the root servers.  Note the significantly lower standard deviation below:

As an added bonus, it will be resilient should the root servers ever come under DDoS.