Baking Soda Biscuits
Now for any bakers out there I'm certain you are looking at the title and thinking.....Baking Soda? Is he crazy? You use Baking Powder. Of course you would be right. Baking Powder biscuits with lard and buttermilk are yummy and a staple in many Canadian households.
Baking Soda biscuits are a bit unusual but here we go.
Now with rising food prices I like looking for any possible way to save on food prices. Flour just happens to be the absolute cheapest carbohydrate you can purchase in Canada.
On sale for $4.00 (CAD) for 5kg of flour means about only 8 cents per 100g. Put another way 500g would cost 40 cents and give enough calories for a person for a day! Unfortunately you can't survive on flour alone and you can't eat it all by itself. Well, not unless you make sourdough bread but that's a topic for another day.
The easiest way to eat flour is by turning it into a biscuit. Bread may be cheaper but biscuits are much much faster. Unfortunately you need a leavening agent to make the biscuit rise. Baking powder is great just add any liquid and it works. Baking soda is different. It will not help anything rise *unless you add an acid to it. So if you wonder why on earth I'm adding Diet Cola to a biscuit recipe...its added to help the mix rise and be fluffy 🙂
The Recipe
Here is an image of everything I'll be using today:
2 cups of whole wheat flour (20 cents)
1/2 cup of canola oil * (31 cents)
1 tbsp of sugar (2 cents)
1/2 tsp of baking soda (1 cent)
1/2 tsp of salt (negligible)
3/4 cup of Diet Pepsi. (15 cents)
Total cost to prepare : 69 cents CAD (50 cents HBD)
Total calories if prepared with regular cola : 2041 calories
Enough calories to get you through a day for about 50 cents. Totally lacking in nutrition but the absolute cheapest way I can think to get 2000 calories 🤣
Side note: I deep fried some pork yesterday. Rather than throw away the frying oil I filtered it and will be using that instead of "virgin" canola oil. Throwing away the oil from yesterday just seems wasteful.
Steps in the process
Now after my last post I was told by the head people in the group that I should put myself into the pictures. I have a cellphone holder and set it up to take pictures. Unfortunately I'm still working at getting all of me into the view. I'm doing my best and hopefully I'll get better in the future.
On with the steps;
First: Measure and mix the dry ingredients. That would be the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt.
Second: Make sure the dry ingredients are well mixed (I used a whisk).
A simple stirring motion works fine here
Then its time to add in the oil. Again I use the whisk and use the wires to "cut up" the oil to make it look like a rough crumble. I stir and stab for a few minutes until it has the desired consistency.
Third: Once the oil has coated the flour mixture its time to add the Pepsi. Now once I mix the Pepsi (acid) into the baking soda its going to bubble and foam to leaven the biscuit. If I'm too slow here I'm going to end up with rock hard biscuits. In that regard I mix quicky by hand.
Fourth: Form the biscuit mix into bite sized biscuits and place on the wire rack. I should probably have a solid rack to put it on next time but even this way it still worked out.
Fifth: Place the biscuits into the halogen oven. Set the temperature for 450F and the time for 12minutes. Hit start and wait for the baking to occur. Luckily the halogen oven heats up so quicky I don't have to worry about preheating a large oven in the house. So much faster that way.
Sixth: Take them out. Let them cool for a bit (they are already on a wire rack) and then enjoy with some jam, peanut butter, nutella....or in my case just some margarine.
Yummy :)
Tasty
... Quick
...... and inexpensive :)
Now..
I'm still working on how to format these posts. Any advice on how to fit better with community guidelines would be appreciated.
Just for myself (mostly)
If you are reading past here you are looking at my notes to myself about the cost of ingredients. Important to me because I'm looking to find the least expensive way to get the most nutrition...something I'll be exploring in every post. There isn't any additional cooking/baking in this section just a lot of math and images of what I'm buying to make the biscuits ... but if you are curious by all means take a look :)
Cost of Baking Powder VS Baking Soda.
$5.79 / 2kg. 2.5g per batch. 2000/2.5 = 800 batches which equals less than 1c per batch
OR
$ 5.49 / 450g. 15g (1tbsp) per batch. 450/15 = 30 batches which equals just over 18 cents per batch.
Sure it isn't much by itself but when you are counting costs every more economical food choice adds up :)
Interesting fact in this recipe.
2 cups of flour = about 250g of flour @ 8 cents / 100 gram = 20 cents
so 1tbsp of baking powder costs as much as two cups of flour.
The sugar is $15.97/10kg. 1tbsp of sugar = 15g. So: 15/10000*15.97 = 2.4 cents.
26.7c/100ml for the oil. 1/2cup = 118ml or 31.5cents
As for the cola? 88 cents/liter and I used 3/4cup which is 177ml. Doing th math again: 88 *177/100 = 15 cents.