Low-Sodium Scratch Biscuits

A few weeks ago, i made scratch biscuits. Afterward, I calculated the amount of calories and sodium. (I used salted butter for the fat option and did not reduce the added salt.) I was surprised by the amount of sodium. The amount of sodium in the batch of 14 cut biscuits was 4600 mg (329/biscuit). The FDA provides information about salt consumption and methods for lowering it. Note: "The amount of salt in a food is listed as “sodium” on the Nutrition Facts label that appears on food packaging."

Sodium
I found some ways to reduce sodium in a future recipe.

• Reduce or eliminate sodium in baking powder.
• Reduce added salt when taking salted butter into account.
• Use the finer granularity popcorn salt—thinking that it might dissolve more quickly and completely in dough than table salt—more flavor bang.

Common in many scratch biscuit recipes is using three teaspoons of baking powder. Almost all baking powders have 60 mg sodium per 1/8 teaspoon—1440 per biscuit batch, about 100 mg per biscuit. Hain Pure Foods Featherweight Baking Powder uses potassium instead of sodium. This product is more expensive and not as readily available as regular baking soda. Amazon reviews are helpful for product satisfaction, quantity substitutions, and availability at Whole Foods.
Salt info websites:

• Salt (lots of pictures and explanations)
• Salt Varieties and Types (another good reference, but fewer pictures)

Fats
Fats called for in biscuits include salted butter, unsalted butter, margarine, shortening, and lard. Various recipes list a choice of salted and unsalted fats without addressing sodium adjustments. By personally perusing nutrition tables, I noticed that most salted butters and spreads would add about 720 mg of sodium to the recipe (~51 mg/biscuit) without regard to additional salt.

Various websites state that unsalted butter tends to have fresher ingredients than salted butter. In any case, if you choose to use salted butter in recipes, you should reduce the amount of added salt. For the biscuit recipe, I called for a conservative 1/2 teaspoon of popcorn salt. If you use salted butter, maybe use only 1/4 teaspoon salt.

Shortening and margarines have trans fats, in case you want to avoid them. Some margarines list 0 grams of trans fats. Note that all these fats list 1 tablespoon is one serving, and that if the amount of trans fats is less than .4 gram, companies can round off and show 0 to be the amount.

If you are a vegetarian (not a vegan), you can, in good conscience, consume butter. Related article: "12 Seemingly Vegan & Vegetarian Foods That Really Aren't"

Near the bottom of this article, look for calorie and sodium stats for ingredients.
My pixstrip shows five main image areas:

1. Implements
2. Ingredients
3. Start of the process that is common to both drop and cut biscuits (milk excluded)
4. Process continuation—1/2 amount recipe, drop biscuits
5. Process continuation—1/2 amount recipe, cut biscuits

Implements

• Group 1
  • Cups to measure with
  • Medium mixing bowl
  • Plate (optional for grating butter onto)
  • Forks for tossing grated butter into the dry ingredients
  • Pastry blender
  • Measuring spoons (various sizes as needed)
• Group 2 (Item to cut or grate butter with—I used my salad shooter. Using a cheese grater is OK.)
• Group 3 (bowls for separate drop and cut biscuit doughs—unnecessary if making only one kind)
• Group 4 (baking pans)

Ingredients

• 2 C all-purpose flour
• 4 t no-sodium baking powder
• 1/2 t popcorn salt
• 1/2 C unsalted butter
• Milk (1 C if drop biscuits, 3/4 C if cut biscuits)

Instructions, Initial

1. Preheat the oven to 400°.
2. Measure and pour the dry ingredients into the main mixing bowl, stirring them together with a pastry blender.
3. Grate the butter into the dry ingredients (plateful of grated butter shown in pixtrip).
4. Use two forks to toss the items together thoroughly, avoiding warming the butter.
5. Use the pastry blender to fine-blend the mixture.

Instructions, Drop and Cut Recipe Differentiation

1. Divide the dough evenly from the previous step into two bowls.

Note: The pixstrip shows separate sections for 1/2 recipe each for drop and cut biscuits. If making only one type, don't bother dividing the dough.

2. Use pastry blender to blend in milk.
•  
• □ Half-recipe drop biscuits, 1/2 C
• □ Half-recipe cut biscuits, 3/8 C
•  
• □ Full-recipe drop biscuits, 1 C
• □ Full-recipe cut biscuits, 3/4 C
•  
3. Continue steps for biscuit shapes as desired.

Shaping, Drop Biscuits

1. Use the forks to collect and shape dough balls onto the pan(s).
2. Bake for about 10-14 minutes.

Shaping, Cut Biscuits

1. Place dough into lightly floured pan(s). Sprinkle flour on top, press to ~1/2 inch thick, fold; repeat at least three times. (I encountered some recipes that called for up to 10 times of similar kneading.)
2. Cut shapes with biscuit cutter, cooky spatula, drinking glass, or other means and arrange on the pan. (Some recipes called for cutter diameters from 2" to 3". A plastic shape I used had once held icing from a tube of Pillsbury refrigerated cinnamon rolls.)
3. Bake for about 10-14 minutes.

Post-Recipe Thoughts
The biscuits came out paler that I expected. Maybe the next time, I'll raise the temperature or bake longer. (I didn't want to overbake and dry by adding 4 minutes.) And although not as salty as I might have wanted, I could always spread salted butter.

I'm not sure that using popcorn salt, with its finer granularity, is more effective than ordinary table salt. Sure, it's more expensive, as is the potassium baking powder. The table shows, however, that the butter is the costliest ingredient. In the big picture, homemade biscuits are way cheaper than refrigerated biscuits or getting them from a bakery or eatery.

Contrasting Costs of Biscuits Using Regular and Specialty Baking Powders and Salts

		low-sodium $	reg ingred $
Flour		.20	.20
Potassium baking powder		.51
Regular baking powder			.08
Popcorn salt		.03
Table salt			.01
Unsalted butter		.75	.75
Nonfat milk (1 C, drop)		.25	.25
Nonfat milk (3/4 C, cut)		.19	.19
Full batch of 14	drop	1.74	1.29
	cut	1.68	1.23
Individual	drop	.12	.09
	cut	.12	.09

The drop biscuits are way easier and require less effort and time to make than the cut ones. The difference in calories between drop and cut biscuits is negligible, about 2 or 3 calories each biscuit.

Regarding sodium, using a recipe that calls for 3 teaspoons of regular baking soda and a teaspoon of salt instead of my recipe adds 2640 mg sodium per batch, about 189 mg extra per biscuit. And who eats only one biscuit per sitting? :-)


Stats for Calories and Sodium

Ingredients		Calories	Sodium (mg)
flour (2 C)		800	0
potassium baking powder (4 tsp), Hain Featherweight		0	0
popcorn salt (1/2 tsp), Kernel Season's		0	940
unsalted butter (1/2 C)		800	0
milk	1 C, for drop biscuits	80	107
	3/4 C, for cut biscuits	60	80

Biscuit Quantity	Shape	Calories	Sodium (mg)
Full batch of 14	drop	1680	1047
	cut	1660	1020
Individual	drop	120	75
	cut	119	73

Further Considerations
Potassium and sodium balance: "The trade-off for no sodium is every teaspoon of this baking powder has 500-600 milligrams potassium. That could be a problem for people with kidney disease whose potassium is running high, or someone taking blood pressure medicines that save potassium in the body."

Grating butter: Most biscuit recipes call for cutting the fat into the dry ingredients. I saw two recipes that called for grating cold butter—one for drop, and one for cut biscuits. Grating makes sense to me for easier and more thorough blending of ingredients. My salad shooter did a decent job of grating and also preventing butter warming from hand contact.

Thanksgiving Day Menu, From a Language Perspective

Being someone who thinks about the English language a lot, I often think of associative terminology. In my topic about Thanksgiving Day food, I'm putting a twist on it and injecting some flavor into the discussion, language-wise. Turkey is at the top of the food list. For vegetarians and vegans, skip reading "turkey", or discontinue reading this article. Other items are (from the top of my head) potatoes, sweet potatoes (sometimes interchangeably called yams), cranberry sauce, dressing (aka stuffing), gravy, and pumpkin pie. What about veggies? They'll roll onto the scene. I'll bypass food discussion pertaining to all-day football, as that could be an entire subject by itself.

Turkey: Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national symbol rather than the eagle. Google results indicate Franklin was displeased with the choice of the eagle, but not entirely clear that he lobbied for the turkey. More recently, in the previous century anyway, turkey has become an unflattering term. "Jive turkey!" was a derisive insult often uttered by George Jefferson of The Jeffersons TV show. Turkey has been a term used to label a bad movie; even better, Golden Turkey Awards go to both movies and directors. Cold turkey as a term does not refer to the temperature of the bird. One other Turkey is the country, which always makes me go "hmmm" when I think of it in conjunction with another country that makes me think of food—Greece.

Potatoes: We have Mr. Potato Head, couch potato, hot potato, .... Regarding edible potatoes, there seem to be lots of ways to prepare them, serve them, and buy them already prepared—baked, mashed, twice-cooked, scalloped, fried, liquified or nearly liquified into soups, chunked into salads, etc.

Sweet Potatoes and Yams: This subtopic required googling for "sweet potatoes vs yams". And wow, what a load of results! Here's one link that has descriptions for each—http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/sweetpotato.html. Sounds like yams are not as common as sweet potatoes in my neck of the woods. Oh, well, as Popeye might say, "I yam what I yam and I yam what I yam that I yam!" Maybe Popeye doesn't handle hot potatoes, sweet or not. Anyway, let's move to a sweeter topic—Swee'Pea, his adopted baby. That brings us to ...

Sweet Pea(s): Peas—those Crayola-green spheroids. Oh, if they're canned peas, they have that odd olive-green color about them. Sweet Pea does seem an odd name for a baby. Nevertheless, Tommy Roe made a hit song in the mid-60s named "Sweet Pea" about a girl. (Well, this looked like a good area as any to shoehorn "sweet peas" as a candidate vegetable for the Thanksgiving Day meal.)

Cranberry Sauce: The first time I saw cranberry sauce, it came out of can. It resembled jelly that you dish out with a knife or spoon. It retained the shape of the can and the utensil characteristic used to serve it up. It didn't pour like a sauce. Even odder, I didn't consider it tasty for such a pretty color. Still don't. Even its liquid relative—cranberry cocktail—isn't that appealing to me.

Dressing and Stuffing: I think these terms are strange names for the same food—flavored and moistened diced bread that contains other items—celery, onions, sage (predominant flavor!), .... Stuffing, as a term, makes sense, particularly when it's actually placed inside the turkey. Dressing, as a term, makes no sense to me. Related, the term "salad dressing" makes sense, as you're dressing a salad. Turkey dressing? I don't see turkey dressing dressing a turkey like I see salad dressing dressing a salad.

Gravy: Good gravy, gravy train, Gravy Train. Good gravy—this expression has nothing to do with good or gravy. It's a polite and not-that-common expression of surprise. The two kinds of gravy trains pertain to implicitness of advantage, the proper-noun expression (dog food) having been named from the lower-case gravy train. Eh, let's leave the Gravy Train at the station and move on to pumpkin pie. (I rethought my initial intent to hyperlink to Gravy Train. Readers are on their own for this googling.)

Pumpkin Pie: These two words can evoke lots of language imagery separately. Pumps have kin? What kin they look like? Lotion pumps? Miniature oil-drilling pumps? OK. There are some etymological roots for pumpkin, but they all sound like slacked pronunciation devolution to me, since the word pump has no kinship with the word pumpkin. As for pie, besides the edible ones, I also think of pi and pie charts.

What's after dessert? How about antacids? Anyway, I hope this article has provided some food for thought. May your Thanksgiving Day be a good one, with plenty to be thankful for.