Low Carb Chicken and Biscuits Using Carbquick

Carbquick makes great Low Carb Chicken and Biscuits
for those doing net carbs and not sensitive to wheat protein.

Carbquick Baking mix is high in protein and low in carbs. At 1-1/2 net carbs per biscuit, even those on very low-carb diets can squeeze one in, provided you aren't sensitive to wheat proteins and are counting net carbs instead of total.

This recipe uses canned soup, so I've included a low-carb soup list to show you the individual carb counts for the different soup options, but I also provided lower carb alternatives for thickening the gravy if you don't want to use the canned soup.

Whether you're doing Atkins 2002, Atkins 20, Atkins 40, or any other low-carb plan, provided you are not allergic to wheat or gluten intolerant, you can make a great low-carb chicken-and-biscuits casserole using Carbquick Baking Mix.

This would also be a great recipe for those moving into pre-maintenance or maintenance.

At 90 percent fewer carbs than traditional Bisquick, these light-and-fluffy low-carb drop biscuits will only cost you 1-1/2 net carbs each.

Low-carb biscuits baked on top of a simple chicken stew will add a nice homey touch to your low-carb meal.

Making the gravy for this special dish isn't difficult, either, thanks to the convenience of cream of celery soup. It weighs in at only 12.5 net carbs for the entire can.

While I used to use Cream of Chicken and Mushroom Soup when I first created this recipe, Campbell's has changed their cream-soup recipes, so I had to change mine too!

If you don't want to use canned soup, you can still enjoy this low-carb chicken casserole. The recipe includes a few alternatives you can use instead of processed soup.

Don't Limit Yourself to Just Chicken

When I first created this low-carb chicken casserole, I didn't use chicken in it.

At that time, we lived close to the Norbest turkey processing plant, so I was able to pick up high-quality, natural turkeys and turkey parts for a better price than I could buy them at the supermarket.

The day before I made this, I threw 5 pounds of boneless turkey thighs into the crock pot, added some water, and cooked the turkey all day on low. But you could also use turkey legs or wings, as well.

You can do the exact same thing with chicken legs and thighs, which is how I make this now because we no longer live near a turkey plant, and Kroger's turkey parts are a bit expensive.

A whole chicken will also work if they are economical in your area. Here, it's cheaper to pick up a pre-cooked $5 roasted chicken from Costco than it is to buy a whole chicken uncooked.

Pre-cooked rotisserie chickens, readily available at Costco and in almost every supermarket today, would work well in this low-carb chicken casserole dish. Just skip the crockpot, chop the chicken up, and use homemade broth you already have in the freezer.

How To Cook the Chicken Ahead

For crockpot cooking, toss your chicken or turkey pieces into the crockpot, then add a bit of water, and cook them all day on low. I like to add a tablespoon of garlic powder and 2 tablespoons of salt to a full pot of water. For the crock pot, I use only half of that. It gives the meat a nice flavor.

Alternatively, you could just simmer the chicken or turkey parts over the stove in enough water to cover. Once the chicken or turkey parts are tender enough that the meat is falling off the bones, separate the meat from the bones.

Chill the water and crockpot drippings overnight in a covered container. You can do the same thing with the water you simmered the chicken in over the stove. This extra step allows you to remove the layer of fat that accumulates on top of the drippings.

Is Canned Cream Soup Low Carb?

Is canned cream soup low in carbs? It depends on how many carbs you have to work with.

How you thicken this stew is up to you, of course. What you want to use depends on:

• your personal taste
• your carbohydrate tolerance
• which low-carb plan you're following
• whether you're in weight-loss mode or maintenance
• how you feel about the individual ingredients
• how sensitive you are to certain starches

My experience with low-carb diets goes back to 1975, when the Atkins Carbohydrate Ladder and all of the strange ideas that the low-carb community has about low-carb diets today did not exist.

Advice on returning carbohydrate to the diet, bit by bit, was completely different than what the Atkins Diet has morphed into today.

Atkins 72 was more lenient than later versions about foods you could or couldn't add back to your diet because the focus was on portion control. 

You didn't have to count carbohydrates on a daily basis because you returned foods to your diet one 5-8 carbohydrate gram serving at a time. Anything that fit within your daily or weekly macros was considered low carb.

This was because Dr. Atkins wanted to create a low-carb diet that folks could stick with. His advice to readers in 1972 on what types of carbs to add back was this:

"Your whole purpose should be to make this diet as easy and congenial as you can. And it is designed for that. You'll find for yourself that there are many ways in which you can bend this diet without breaking it."

Breaking the diet, in Dr. Atkins definition, was simply going over your carbohydrate tolerance level for the day.

The idea Dr. Atkins presented was to find the carbohydrate level where everything worked well and the carbohydrate level where it stopped working, so you could use the carb level that worked best to fine-tune the diet to fit your own metabolism and taste.

If canned creamed soup fit into your carbohydrate tolerance level, then canned cream soups were fine.

Canned creamed soup may or may not
fit into your low-carb plan.

This is the advice I've stuck with over the years.

There are places where I bent the diet, just as Atkins suggested, and cornstarch and cream soup were two of those places for me. Today, cream soup is off the menu, but that is due to celiac disease and not because most low carbers consider it junk.

I played the health food game for years when I was doing Atkins Phase 2, and a clean, ketogenic diet never improved my health, even slightly; so now, I have a more balanced approach to eating.

Canned Cream-of Soup Carb Counts 

When I first created this recipe, I used Campbell's Cream of Chicken and Mushroom soup because the carb count was only 7-1/2 net carbs for the entire can.

Today, that is no longer true.

This particular type of creamed soup has 8 net carbs per 1/2 cup serving of condensed soup. With 2-1/2 servings per can, that comes to 20 net carbs now.

This morning, I went to the Campbell's soup page and checked out the carb counts for their various soups. They are now listing the nutrients for 1/2 cup servings of condensed soup, rather than calling it a generic serving size.

These are 10-1/2 ounce cans, so at 1/2 cup per serving, there are still 2-1/2 servings per can.

The 98% fat-free versions were much higher in carbs, due to the use of non-fat milk in the recipe instead of cream, so keep that in mind when you look over the following list of possibilities.

Even though they are the same carb count as cream of mushroom soup, the fat-free versions are higher in lactose.

1. 98% fat-free cream of celery soup: 9 carbs, 1 gram of fiber
2. 98% fat-free cream of chicken soup: 8 carbs, 0 fiber
3. 98% fat-free cream of mushroom soup: 9 carbs, 1 gram of fiber
4. cream of chicken and mushroom soup: 8 carbs, 0 fiber
5. cream of broccoli soup: 9 carbs, 1 gram of fiber
6. cream of chicken soup: 9 carbs, 3 grams of fiber
7. cream of mushroom soup: 8 carbs, 2 grams of fiber
8. cream of celery soup: 8 carbs, 3 grams of fiber

The first 5 soups have 8 net carbs per 1/2-cup serving. Cream of chicken and cream of mushroom have 6 net carbs per serving, and cream of celery has only 5.

For this recipe, I decided to use the cream of celery soup since I'm using a cup of frozen peas and carrots (6 net carbs) to make it more authentic, but using mushroom or chicken soup instead would only add 1/4 gram of carbohydrate per serving.

If You Don't Want to Use Creamed Soup

A 10-1/2 ounce can of condensed soup is equal to about 1-1/4 cups of extra-thick gravy, so you'll need to add that amount of liquid to the recipe and figure out a way to thicken it.

In addition to the soup, the recipe adds 2 cups of stock, some sour cream, and a bit of vegetable gum to tighten it all up.

If you eliminate the condensed soup, you'll need something thicker than simply using heavy cream to replace it. Most brands of heavy cream today are quite thin when compared to even a couple of years ago, and what you'll need must imitate the thickness of a can of condensed soup.

The results you get from thickening the 3-1/4 total cups of liquid needed for this recipe will be far more palatable when 2 types of thickeners are used together.

For example:

In the original recipe, I used something called Not-Starch to thicken the chicken broth that I added to the creamed soup.

Many people put xanthan gum in a salt shaker, sprinkle it over the liquid, and whisk it in as it cooks. Adding too much vegetable gum, however, will give you slimy gravy or sauce.

Other alternatives would be cream cheese, additional sour cream, coconut cream (the stuff that hardens at the top of the can when you place a can of real coconut milk into the refrigerator), or cornstarch.

To thicken homemade chicken broth, you'll have to
use something that imitates the thickening power
of canned condensed soups.

Whatever you choose, you'll need to account for the carbohydrates you use by subtracting them from the 12-1/2 carbs in the can of soup.

For example:

If you use an 8-ounce brick of cream cheese (about 8 carbs) and increase the sour cream to 1/2 cup (extra 2 carbs) to replace the soup, that comes to a total of 10 carbs.

Since 10 carbs is less than the 12-1/2 carbs in the canned soup, you could use a little more celery to replace the lost flavor in the soup, keeping the carb count the same, or divide the extra 2-1/2 carbs by 4, and subtract that number (.6) from each serving in the recipe.

Without the extra celery, the carb count per serving would be 8.4 net carbs.

Alternatively, you could use 3-1/4 cups of chicken broth, instead of 2, and use 2 tablespoons of cornstarch to make the 1-1/4 cups for the soup portion extra thick. This would be 14 carbs, which is only 1-1/2 carbs more than what's in the soup.

The 1-1/2 extra carbs spread across four servings would add 1/3 carb to the carb count, so each serving would be 9-1/3 net carbs.

You could also do something that is in between these two alternatives. Using 5 ounces of cream cheese and 1 tablespoon of cornstarch would be 12 carbs, close enough to 12-1/2 to call it good.

What is Thick-it-Up?

Not-Starch is what I used in the original recipe. Not-Starch was a product that offered a mixture of vegetable gums, instead of just xanthan gum or guar gum, and was especially handy because you could mix it into either cold or hot liquids without it lumping up on you.

But Not-Starch is no longer available today.

The most popular product on the market right now is called Thick-it-up, by Dixie Carb Counter's.

Like Not-Starch, Thick-it-up uses a combination of guar gum, xanthan gum, acacia, and locust bean (and/or tara) for better results than just using xanthan or guar, but I don't know if it has the exact same thickening power as Not-Starch did.

A tablespoon of Not-Starch thickened 2 cups of chicken broth, so that's how much I used in the original recipe.

The information on Thick-it-up that I found on Amazon today said to use only 1 teaspoon to thicken 2 cups of broth, so I have readjusted the recipe below to reflect those instructions.

Although Thick-it-up is said to be gluten free, I have not tried it yet. I need to look into it further to make sure the xanthan gum was raised on cornstarch, rather than wheat starch, before I even attempt to use it.

I have violent reactions to xanthan gum that has been grown on wheat starch.

Low Carb Chicken and Biscuits Casserole

This recipe is perfect for a cold, winter evening, and offers a nice change of pace from simple baked chicken and a salad. At 9 net carbs it will easily fit into a standard low-carb menu (35 to 40 net carbs per day) and with a bit of pre-planning, a stricter one as well.

While the biscuits are what makes this casserole special, you can carve another 3 carbs off the carb count by leaving them out. Just cover the chicken stew with foil and bake until it's heated completely through.

Casserole Ingredients:

• 3 cups cooked, chopped chicken or turkey
• 3 chopped green onions
• 2 stalks sliced celery
• 1 cup frozen peas and carrots
• drippings or chicken stock to equal about 2 cups
• 1 tsp Thick-it-up
• Campbell's Cream of Celery soup
• 1/4 cup sour cream

Method:

1. Spray a square baking pan with non-stick cooking spray to make clean up easier. If you're using a pan with a lip, spray the lip too. Set the pan aside.
2. In a large saucepan, combine the 2 cups of drippings, broth, and/or stock with all of the veggies and cook for about 15 to 20 minutes, or just until the vegetables are barely tender.
3. Transfer the veggies to the prepared pan with a slotted spoon. You should have about 1 cup of broth left since simmering the vegetables helped to reduce the volume.
4. Allow the broth to cool a bit, then sprinkle with Thick-it-Up and whisk until smooth.
5. Cook the broth over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture begins to simmer.
6. Add the cream soup (or whatever you're using to replace it).
7. Continue cooking and stirring for about 10 to 15 minutes, until the sauce is as thick as it's going to get.
8. Turn off the heat and stir in the sour cream.
9. Add the chopped, cooked chicken to pre-cooked vegetables in the prepared pan and stir to mix. Top with the thickened sauce and stir again.

For the Low-Carb Biscuits:

Biscuit Ingredients:

• 1 cup Carbquick
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp dried basil
• 1/4 cup heavy cream mixed with 1/4 cup water
• OR 1/2 cup Calorie Countdown milk

Method:

1. In another bowl, combine Carbquick, baking powder, Parmesan cheese and spices.
2. Fold in your milk substitute and stir until moistened.
3. Drop batter in spoonfuls across the top of casserole. Since the casserole serves 4, I usually portioned it out into 8 blobs.
4. Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, until the low-carb biscuit topping is nice and browned.

At 4 servings, the chicken and biscuits come out to 9 net carbs per serving, 6 net carbs without the biscuits on top.