DIY Whole Wheat Baking Mix

I LOOOOOOOVE  Bisquick.

Growing up, weekday breakfasts generally meant a bowl of cereal or piece of toast. But Saturday meant pulling the Bisquick box out of the cupboard, scooping some into a bowl, adding a dash of milk and an egg or 2 and cooking up pancakes or waffles or some other yummy carbohydrate coma inducing breakfast. If I'm brutally honest, pancakes made from scratch just don't taste the same to me..... which is kind of sad.

With the family's switch to real food, one of the obvious things to go was the box of Bisquick. I didn't throw out the old box but I really only saved it for "emergencies". So my Jumbo Box Store size package had actually managed to last me for the last 6 or so months. Sadly, we are down to the last scoop or so. I figured it was about time to really work on a good substitute. I had tried several 'from scratch' recipes for whole wheat pancakes (what's the point of redoing a recipe if you don't healthy it up a bit?) but I hadn't made any that seemed quite right to me.

Recently I had been put on to the King Arthur's White Whole Wheat Flour-(they are NOT a sponsor, I swear!)-- its a 100% whole wheat flour but naturally lighter in color and flavor. I've been using that in all my baking and its been a GREAT way of coverting all-purpose flour based recipes. So I thought I'd try to find a DIY Bisquick recipe and swap out the flours and see how it went. Unfortunately, most of the recipes call for shortening, which to me is about the MOST unnatural substance in the food industry. Certainly it is nothing I want to eat or feed my family. Luckily I found this base recipe that was 50/50 white/wheat flours and used butter! Score!!

So, I put together a half batch using 100% whole wheat flour. It came out great! I made a few plain pancakes and the rest of the batch became pumpkin pancakes (I promise I'm posting that recipe next!). The plain pancakes had all of the flavor of Bisquick that I really liked. They were soft, fluffy, buttery and deeeeeeeeeelicious!

I will say that a few years ago I had tried to do a home Bisquick mix and I had followed the directions and used shortening. I hated it. I never got the flavor or texture I wanted out of it. Using butter seems to be the key here, at least for me. As it does contain butter, I'd recommend keeping it in an airtight container inside the fridge. Some people keep it in the freezer.  In either case, unless you house is pretty consistently cool, it'd probably do best in the chill box somewhere.

 

 

 

100% Whole Wheat Baking Mix

• 5 cups whole wheat flour (see note above)
• 6 tablespoons baking powder
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt (only if using unsalted butter!!!)
• 1 cup butter (salted or unsalted), cold

1) Add dry ingredients to work bowl of your food processor.
2) Divide butter into 1 Tbs sized chunks.
3) Add to food processor.
4) Pulse until combined-- it should look like and feel like a dry mix. Resist the urge to over process or hold the button down, you'll just melt your butter and make lumps!

                        Use as you would standard Bisquick:

Pancakes: 2 cups mix, 1 cup milk, 2 eggs

Waffles: 2 cups mix, 1 1/3 cups milk, 2 Tbs cooking oil (coconut), 1 egg

Biscuits: 2 1/4 cups mix, 2/3 cup milk, drop or roll out/cut, bake 8-10 min @ 450 F on ungreased cookie sheet.

As always, due to flour variations (especially amongst whole wheat types) you may need to add additional milk or water to achieve desired consistency!


Please feel free to comment below and let me know how this worked out for you!!

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