Receta Product Review: Gluten Free Bisquick
February 2, 2011Product Review: Gluten Free Bisquick
Product Review
So in pursuit of gluten free baking (while I wait for my assortment of weird flours to get here from Amazon), I picked up a box of Gluten Free Bisquick from Walmart (I also saw it in Kroger). This thing was about a third of the size of a regular box of Bisquick and twice the price. But hey, it was worth a try to see if we can ease the transition.
The first thing we tried was the pancakes. This is a pretty straight forward recipe involving eggs, oil, milk, and the mix itself. Much like regular Bisquick. Naturally I can’t NOT fiddle, so I replaced the oil with applesauce and added Greek yogurt (1/4 cup), then cooked them using some oil on my griddle. I am thrilled to report that these tasted like real pancakes. The recipe said it would make 8 4″ pancakes. I got 10. We had real maple syrup and applewood smoked bacon with them for a DELICIOUS Sunday morning breakfast.
The next thing we tried with this mix was the recipe for pizza crust. Now I am a pizza crust snob. I make mine from scratch and it’s damned good, so I have, shall we say, discerning taste when it comes to pizza crust. But, as I said earlier, I’m still waiting on my assortment of alternative flours to get in so that I can try the gluten free pizza crust recipe in Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes A Day, and we wanted pizza tonight, so Bisquick it was.
When I mixed things up as directed (using oil, eggs, water, and the mix), the dough itself was a really STRANGE texture IMO. Very gloppy, not at all stiff in any way. You could never use this on a pizza stone, so I hauled out a shallow pyrex casserole dish and pressed it along the greased bottom of that. You do a prebake of this crust for 15 minutes, then add all your toppings, and bake another 15.
The verdict: Um…no. The crust itself was very crumbly. You could never pick this up as a slice. It absorbed all the sauce so that even I–who am not a big sauce fan to begin with–found it too dry. It was, all in all, like eating pizza on very thin cornbread. I had a quarter of the pizza. Hubby had a quarter and another half quarter. The dogs ate the rest. What we did eat is now sitting in our stomach like lead. I do NOT recommend this for pizza crust.
So overall impressions of the product…I think it’s probably perfectly fine for breakfast items–which is what Bisquick is best at, after all.
TAGS:Product Review