Cooking with Food Storage: Pioneer Biscuits

My deepest apologies for not posting in a week - I have been so busy with work and the rest of the Trek preparations. I did manage to make my apron after all, and the four loaves of bread. I finished all the quilt preparations as well. Now it is onto the Trek!

In the meantime, I thought I would show you how to make the biscuits we are baking for everyone on the Trek. We experimented quite a few times to make sure we got something everyone would love and would be quick and easy to make. This post is the recipe we decided on.

We used a premade mix that is available at the big box stores.

There is a biscuit recipe on the back of the box, and that is the reference point we started with. However, we modified it to save prep time.  The recipe on the box is really simple:

3 cups biscuit mix
1 cup milk

The directions state to moisten the mix and then roll it out and use a biscuit cutter to make the biscuits. We decided to turn this mix into drop biscuits. No rolling pins or biscuit cutters needed. So we changed the ingredients as follows:

3 cups biscuit mix
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups milk

Now we didn't use fresh milk from the store. We mainly used powdered milk (along with some ultra pasteurized milk that was about to expire). We reconstituted it before measuring  (normally, I just add the powder to the dry mix and then use water.) The reason I give a range for the milk is because we were looking for a certain consistency, and sometimes the batter only needed 1 1/4 cups milk and sometimes it needed 1 1/2 cups. With that in mind, lets make some biscuits! 

All the pictures below were taken at the house of my biscuit making partner. She doesn't have a four legged one standing in the kitchen, getting in the way trying to help!

Start with 3 cups of mix. Then add the milk. I only added 1 1/4 cups at first and then added the extra 1/4 cup if it was needed.

Mix it in quickly, however, don't over mix it. It can make the biscuits tough if you over mix it. To make drop biscuits, you need a dough that is more moist. It should have a 'sticky' look to it and not be a typical biscuit dough. Here is a picture of mine.

Drop the dough by a large spoon to make the size you want. We were looking for big biscuits - about 3 inches round. I dropped the dough in a circle that was about 2 1/2 inches round. The extra moisture in the dough made them spread to 3 inches. Be sure to place on a greased cookie sheet. I used Pam. Here is what they should look like.

Then I added a bit of shredded cheddar cheese to the top.

Bake them at 450 degrees for 11 minutes. When they come out of the oven, they should look like this.

We decided to make some honey butter to spread on them. No measuring involved here. We used softened butter and mixed it with honey to taste. We will cut them in half and butter them for the groups because they don't have time to stop and butter their own. We will serve them in big wicker baskets and let each person take what they want. Here is the final result.

Of course, we sampled all of our testing! They were delicious!!