In this post, you’re going to learn how to make soda biscuits.
When you’re in a survival situation, you’ll find that your food options are going to be limited.
You won’t have fancy ingredients to bring out the flavors of your food. This is why most of the things you’ll be eating will be solely to nourish you, rather than for you to enjoy.
However, there are a lot of simple ways that you can turn your boring and bland options into tasty treats.
One of the best ways that you can do this is by making soda biscuits.
What Are Soda Biscuits
Soda biscuits are simple biscuits that are very easy to make. They taste great on their own, or you could add some butter or jam to add some extra flavor. This recipe goes all the way back to the days of the pioneers.
As settlers moved west, they couldn’t bring a lot of supplies with them. And when they arrived at their destination, there were no stores around to buy ingredients either. So they were forced to make do with what they had.
One of the greatest things they cooked up during those times were soda biscuits.
This is why today when survival situations arise, soda biscuits should be your go-to recipe. It’s delicious, it’s filling, and it’s very easy to make!
Ingredients:
- Flour
- Baking Soda
- Salt
- Milk
- Butter or Oil
Equipment:
- Dutch Oven (pot and a lid)
Just like the pioneers, you don’t need a lot in order to cook up some soda biscuits. There are a few variations to this recipe, but all that you really need are flour, baking soda, salt, milk, and butter or oil.
With just these five ingredients, you have all you need to make soda biscuits from scratch.
For equipment needed, if you have an oven around, it is going to make it that much easier. However, in survival situations, it’s unlikely that you’ll have access to an oven.
You’ll be glad to know this recipe is easy because all you need is a dutch oven, which is basically just a large pot with a lid.
How to Make Soda Biscuits
Once you have your ingredients and dutch oven, you are now ready to start baking some soda biscuits!
There are plenty of ways to prepare soda biscuits, so let’s look at a step-by-step for one of the simplest ways to do things.
Instructions
Here are the step by step instructions.
Step 1: Prepare Dry Ingredients
The first thing you’ll want to do is to prepare your dry ingredients.
Mix 2 cups of flour, 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt together in a bowl. You can adjust the salt to suit your taste. If you want it saltier, you could go up to 1 teaspoon of salt.
Also, if you want your soda biscuits sweet, now would be the time to add cocoa powder or sugar.
Step 2: Add Wet Ingredients
Now comes the part where you slowly add the wet ingredients in. You don’t want to just mix everything together all at once. This will make it a lot more difficult to spread all the ingredients evenly, and you’ll get a pretty bad texture on your biscuits.
This is why you should first mix the dry ingredients, then slowly add the wet ingredients.
Add around 1/3 cup of oil and knead it in until your mixture is coarse. Then slowly pour in your milk while mixing. Add around 3/4 cups of milk, or just enough to moisten your mixture.
Step 3: Knead and Cut
Knead your mixture, roll it out, then start shaping it. You can shape it any way that you want as long as you have around 1/2 inch thickness. Use a cookie cutter to get perfect shapes, but if you don’t have one, shaping them with your hands is perfectly fine.
Step 4: Bake your Biscuits
If you have an oven, throw in your soda biscuits at 475 degrees. It should take around 10-12 minutes to be ready.
You could also watch them and wait for them to brown lightly. If you don’t have an oven around, dutch ovens will work perfectly fine.
Place your biscuits in the pot, and put it over hot coals. To bake the biscuits, you also want to put coals on top of the lid. Cooking time is the same, around 10-12 minutes.
Step 5: Enjoy
After waiting for just a few minutes, your soda biscuits are ready to be enjoyed!
Conclusion
This is one of the classic examples that you really don’t need a lot of ingredients to create wonderful dishes. It also shows you that survival cooking doesn’t have to be dull and tasteless either!
I hope this guide helped you learn how to make soda biscuits. You may also like our recipe post on how to make fire cakes and also how to make pemmican the way the pioneers did.
Have you ever made Soda Biscuits to Survive before?