I love traditional Bisquick baking mix. I was raised on it. I’ve used it for as long as I’ve been cooking.

Something I hadn’t heard of popped up on my Amazon Gold Box last week that purports to be a “just add water” Bisquick. (Regular Bisquick requires milk.) This new product comes in small packets. The price was right, so I bought some. It arrived on Friday.

I like biscuits for Sunday breakfast, so I whipped up a batch this morning. The results were interesting. On the negative side, the raw dough is nasty. There are little lumps of a fatty substance, which I assume are the chunks of hydrolyzed fat that turn brown when cooked. The dough also isn’t as salty as regular Bisquick. You definitely won’t be tempted to eat the raw trimmings left from cutting the biscuits.

On the plus side, this gives a nicer biscuit than regular Bisquick, though not as good as my made-from-scratch. It’s a much looser crumb, and those little fat chunks brown nicely, giving a mottled texture to the biscuit. The result looks almost exactly like the picture on the package, a rarity in the food world. The biscuit itself tastes fine.

This also comes in various flavors. One packet makes six small or four large biscuits. It’s made by Betty Crocker (General Mills.) For the allergic crowd, it does contain wheat, milk, and egg ingredients. It also contains partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, in fact, quite a bit of it. (So does regular Bisquick.)

General conclusion: I won’t throw away the rest of the box, but I probably won’t be buying more either.