Bisquick – A Shortcut Loaded with Trans-Fat

I love your posts! So straight to the point and helpful. Keep it up!

I gave up using Bisquick a while ago. If you would like to make your own quick mix in bulk I just recently posted a recipe for it on my blog: http://plate-by-plate.com/homemade-quick-baking-mix-and-biscuits/ There’s also a biscuit recipe too. Using butter works great but beef tallow or lard also works wonderfully. Pass on the transfats and check out Good Calories, Bad Calories if you are worried about saturated fats.

I think Bisquick surprises a lot of people. Your recipe provides a middle ground between trans fat yuck and all natural/high fiber options that can get the “too healthy” vote from many.

I find it frustrating that Fooducate chooses not to highlight (or even mention) the fact that Bisquick makes a “heart smart” product. I feel as though most Fooducate readers are more likely to purchase such an item over the original, therefore it would be more relevant to the readers to highlight products such as these (if nothing else, in addition to the original). In this case, the heart smart bisquick contains no hydrogenated oils, and has about half the fat of the original. Yes, it is still processed, yes, it does have more ingredients than the do-it-yourself recipe, but it’s what I’ve kept on-hand since the product was released and I don’t feel guilty about occasionally using it in a pinch.

As a Southern gal myself, I LOVE biscuits and have been baking them from scratch with my grandmother when I was a small child! It is possible to make great tasting biscuits without trans fat or LARD-(OMG-LARD)! I do love butter as the conjugated linoleic acid that is a natural component can actually be efficiently digested and used by our bodies. You can also use great tasting, affordable coconut oil or palm fruit oil which can be found in the cooking oil sections of most grocery stores. They contain mostly medium chain fatty acids so they are more solid at room temperature and give the great mouth feel texture of a good biscuit. I recently tried mixing all the dry ingredients in a container and saving the milk and fat source for the last step. It really does save on time and helps you avoid Bisquick with the bleached stripped flour that is the main ingredient. For those of us with very little time, this is a real time saver. Thanks for calling attention to the baking mix dilemma. But please know there are non-animal sources of fat that are available and affordable that also make a great tasting biscuit. I use these for my vegan friends; normally I do use butter.

I agree with J in VA about the home-rendered lard. This ridiculous “saturated fat is bad” motto is really irritating. Fat is essential to health but as with everything else, you need to consider the source of that fat. Hydrogenated fats, fat from cornfed beef, and GMO oils are all terrible for us. Just because those fats are the ones used exclusively in the processed food industry, you shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are healthy fats and we need to cook with more of them. If readers are still too terrified to use lard or tallow from grass fed animals, they can try virgin coconut oil or raw butter as a suitable substitute for shortening.

Fooducate, shame on you for encouraging canola oil in recipes. Canola is no better than cottonseed or soybean oil and should not be recommended as a “healthy fat”. All of those oils are made from GM crops which are some of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world. Don’t let that “organic” label fool you: there is evidence of GMO contamination of even the “organic” fields of these crops. You have to assume that some of the readers are cooking for entire families which can include small children. Small children need saturated fat for healthy brain development and canola oil isn’t going to do it. It’s time someone noticed that the children from fat-free homes are suffering just as much nutritionally (albeit from different problems) as children from fast food homes.

Making biscuits couldn’t be easier than my grandmother’s method. She had a huge bowl with a lid that she used to store the dry ingredients. When she wanted to make biscuits, she simply added the fat and the milk and mixed them in a well in the center. This allowed her to add flour to the wet mixture easily until the biscuit dough was perfect consistency. She made biscuits almost every day of her life using this method. There is no box or mix that could have made it faster.

One other note: any ingredient that is vitamin enriched or fortified contains GM corn as the vitamin carrier (and sometimes the vitamin itself is derived from GM corn). Be sure to use unenriched organic flour and organic milk that isn’t fortified (hard to find, I know) if you don’t relish the idea of GM corn oil in your milk.

@Corey
Actually, that is incorrect. Most of them are modified to withstand herbicides so that the entire field can be sprayed and only the weeds will die. Obviously, herbicides are useless without transgenic crops so non-GMO crops don’t get sprayed with herbicides at all. That leaves pesticides and fertilizers which are absolutely necessary in large monoculture crops and less important when using crop rotation and biodiversity practices. The amount of pesticides and fertilizers necessary to grow genetically modified crops increase every year. (http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GMCIPU.php) Now, there are “superweeds” which can’t be killed with Round-up (herbicide the crops are genetically modified to withstand) just like the “superbugs” that no longer respond to normal antibiotics. None of this even addresses the increased allergenic properties of GMO crops and the damage they do to our digestive system when we ingest them. GMOs are a failure and a fraud.
http://www.responsibletechnology.org/GMFree/SpreadtheWord/HealthRisksBrochure/index.cfm

can I make this homemade version in a big premixed batch , too?