Homemade Biscuit Mix ~ Just Add Water

A bachelor friend of mine wanted to help cook dinner, so I put him in charge of biscuits.  He’d never baked in his life, and pasta is one of his most complicated meals. 

While I stirred and prepped other things, I walked him through the process.  He’s pouring things into the bowl at my direction, and it became clear that he’d never actually encountered flour before.

At one point, he looks into the bowl and stares in amazement.  “It’s just powders….you put these powders in the bowl and it makes biscuits…that’s amazing!” 

I thought about it, and that’s almost true.  These were traditional scratch-made biscuits, with butter and milk, but it got me thinking.

You could make tasty real food biscuits with a just add water mix, except for the butter.  That’s the tricky part…now made easy with powdered butter.

I’ve been experimenting with cooking with butter powder, for both emergency preparedness and outfitting our camping kitchen.  My very first attempt at just add water biscuits was a huge success!

Are they the same as a truly scratch biscuit made with cold butter carefully cut into the dough?  Nope.  But they’re still darn good, and underneath a sausage gravy, it’d be hard to tell the difference.

Most homemade just add water biscuit mixes have you take a standard biscuit recipe and substitute shortening (or butter flavored shortening) for the butter.  Toss the whole mess into a food processor, and you get a powder with tiny flecks of shortening in it.  The shortening doesn’t spoil, so you can pack that into a jar and store it in the pantry ready to go, just add water and bake.

I hate shortening.  Beyond the fact that hydrogenated oils are horrible for your health, they just taste horrible.  You can butter flavor the shortening all you want, but you might as well be sugar-coating a turd.

Besides that, it seems a bit messy to store a baking mix with greasy hunks of shortening mixed in.

Butter powder is different.  Fluffy, tasty and actually made out of real butter with nothing crazy mixed in.  For the most part, it’s just butterfat with a boatload of dried milk powder mixed in, which results in a powder that bakes up like a mixture of milk and butter. 

Milk and butter in one, all dried and ready to go for my mix?  Perfect!

Light and fluffy butter powder

This recipe is for a single batch of biscuits, but you can always make it in bulk.  Mix it up one batch at a time and just store it in individual jars, and then you’ve got a dump and go solution for dinner biscuits. 

These are not “drop biscuits” but actually rolled biscuits.  A single batch made 5, cut out with a wide mouth mason jar.

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Homemade Biscuit Mix

Just add water and you've got biscuits ready to go!  This is a single batch recipe, that yields 5 large biscuits.  Just add 1 cup of water, stir, roll out and bake.

Ingredients

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup butter powder
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

Instructions

1. Stir the mix together and store until you're ready to cook them.

2. To prepare, add 1 cup of water and stir until it comes together.  Give the mixture a few quick kneads just to smooth it out, and then roll the biscuits out on a floured surface.

3. Cut and bake for 12-14 minutes at 400 degrees F.

Recipe Notes

If you're making this in bulk, prepare by adding 1 cup water to 2 1/2 cups mix.