The Reason Why Southern Grandmas Have Stopped Buying This Beloved Boxed Mix

Just ask my neighbor, Judith, a grandmother of three and a longtime home baker. She’s been making the same biscuit recipe — with Bisquick’s pancake and baking mix — for decades. This past spring, she noticed something was off with her family-famous biscuits, and she hasn’t made them since. 

Her three-ingredient biscuit recipe — 2 1/2 cups of Bisquick, 3/4 cup of buttermilk, and half a stick of melted salted butter to brush on top — just no longer works the same. She first clocked the change back in April around Easter, when she was making them for brunch. 

“The dough was far too sticky to the point where the biscuits wouldn’t form,” she told me over breakfast. She “dusted a bit more flour to soak up the extra moisture,” but that didn’t fix the sticky situation. Those biscuits came out too dry. She joked (but I believe it was serious), that it “ruined Easter brunch that year.”  

What once yielded a dozen of buttery, flaky biscuits is now a dense block of dough that she described as “inedible.” She thought maybe it was an off day, but after trying her five-decades-old recipe several times over the last few months, she knew it wasn’t her — it was the mix. 

She didn’t know exactly what’s different. So I did a bit of research and found one Redditor had a similar experience making biscuits (in that, they couldn’t). According to the poster, a few weeks later, their mom made a batch of pancakes that  “turned out incredibly strange,” and flat. That same Redditor found a box of Bisquick in their pantry that was a few years old, and noticed that the newer mix had tweaked the leaveners like baking soda and dextrose.

It’s not just biscuits and pancakes that could be affected by this change. Bisquick has been around since 1931, and has become a beloved baking shortcut used in casseroles, cakes, breading for frying, and quick breads.

I can see why home cooks, like Judith and that family on Reddit, are frustrated. These family recipes are near and dear to their hearts, and that’s not something they can just re-create overnight. 

Are your family recipes affected by this change? Tell us about them in the comments below.