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The regional table / Wyoming

Chuckwagon Sourdough Biscuits

Published September 23, 2026 · Wyoming

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A cowboy carried his leaven in a bottle, and what was in the bottle has since been named, counted and published by the Department of Agriculture.

Philip Ashton Rollins, writing in 1922 in The Cowboy, lists what a man tied behind his saddle for a night out on the range: "a frying-pan, some flour, bacon, coffee, salt, and, as a substitute for yeast, either a bottle of sour dough or a can of baking-powder." That is the whole argument of this recipe in one line. Sour dough was not a style or a flavour, it was the leaven you could keep alive without a shop, and its rival was a tin. Rollins goes on to describe the one-man bake — batter spread thinly in the pan, the pan laid on hot coals until a lower crust formed, then tipped on edge and held back from the fire so the loaf could rise before it was pushed close again to brown. A chuckwagon cook with a Dutch oven worked the same principle with more control and a lid. One caution about the word: it appears nowhere in The Trail Drivers of Texas, the 1920 collection of first-hand trail memoirs compiled by J. Marvin Hunter, a book that talks about beans, bacon and coffee at length and never once about sour dough. The thing is documented. The romance around the word is younger than the thing.

What is in the bottle is not folklore either. Harry Snyder's report for the USDA Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin No. 67, Studies on Bread and Bread Making, printed in Washington in 1899, measured it: dough raised by the short-fermentation process ran between 0.3 and 0.4 per cent acidity calculated as lactic acid, while "in sour dough, the acidity was about 0.5 per cent." Seventy years later a federal laboratory named the organisms. Working at the Western Regional Research Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture at Albany, California, T. F. Sugihara, Leo Kline and M. W. Miller screened two hundred yeast isolates from sour dough bakeries and reported that "no bakers' yeast types were found"; the yeast was Saccharomyces exiguus, unable to use maltose, and its "vigor in the particular acidic environment of the sour dough" was what made it the leavener. Kline and Sugihara's companion paper isolated the souring bacteria, which turned out to require maltose at a high level and to produce "lactic and acetic acids with the latter varying from 3 to 26% of the total." So the pair are not competitors: the bacteria eat the sugar the yeast cannot, the yeast lifts the dough in an acid the bacteria make, and the ratio of the two acids is what decides whether your biscuits taste faintly tangy or like vinegar.

Why this version works

Crowded pan, hot oven. Set the biscuits so their sides touch. Their edges then support each other and the only way left to expand is up. A 450°F oven sets the outside before the gas has finished escaping — at 375°F the same dough spreads into pale discs.

Cold fat, barely worked in. Six tablespoons of lard, bacon fat or butter, cut into the flour in pieces the size of peas and no smaller. Those pieces melt in the oven and leave flat pockets of steam behind them, which is where the layers come from. Work them to crumbs and you get a scone.

Soda is the second leaven, not a shortcut. The 1916 Manual for Army Cooks defines bicarbonate of soda in one clause that explains this whole recipe: "sometimes used to neutralize acids found in sour dough." Neutralising an acid with a carbonate makes carbon dioxide, so the same teaspoon that takes the sourness down inflates the biscuit on its way through. This is why the soda goes in at the last moment — the reaction starts the instant it hits the wet sponge and does not wait for the oven.

The overnight sponge does two jobs at once. It makes gas and it makes acid, and the second matters more here. Snyder measured what the acid then does to the flour: an acid of 0.55 per cent, matching what he found in sour dough, dissolved 1.12 per cent of the flour's nitrogen — it takes gluten apart. A biscuit wants exactly that. Bread flour kneaded hard gives you a chewy biscuit; a long acid fermentation gives you a short, tender one without any kneading at all.

Ingredient notes

Fat: lard makes the tenderest biscuit, bacon fat the most interesting one, butter the one most people have. Whichever it is, it must come out of the fridge hard.

Soda: a level teaspoon, measured properly. Too little and the biscuits are sour and squat; too much and you get a soapy, faintly metallic taste and a greenish crumb, which no amount of butter hides.

Flour: three cups of plain all-purpose flour, not bread flour. The acid is already weakening the gluten and a strong flour only fights that. Keep half a cup back for the board.

Starter: one cup of a ripe starter fed at equal weights of flour and water, used four to eight hours after feeding when it is domed and smells sharp but not solventy. A starter that smells of nail varnish has gone too far and will make biscuits that taste of it — feed it twice and try again the next day.

Step by step

  1. Build the sponge at night. Stir the starter, the buttermilk and 2 cups of the flour together in a big bowl until no dry flour remains. Cover and leave at room temperature 8 to 12 hours. It should be bubbled, slack and smell distinctly sour by morning.
  2. Cut in the fat. Heat the oven to 450°F. Put the remaining 1 cup of flour, the salt and the sugar in a second bowl, add the cold fat in chunks, and rub or cut it in until the largest pieces are the size of peas.
  3. Join them, and add the soda last. Sprinkle the soda evenly over the flour-and-fat mixture, then tip the whole thing onto the sponge. Fold with a spatula 8 or 10 times, just until there is no loose flour. The dough will be soft and rough and should stay that way.
  4. Fold, do not knead. Turn out onto a well-floured board, pat into a rough rectangle about an inch thick, fold it in three like a letter, and pat it out to an inch again. Do that twice, no more.
  5. Cut straight down. Cut 12 biscuits with a floured 2½-inch cutter, pressing straight down without twisting — a twisted edge seals and the biscuit rises lopsided. Push the scraps together gently for the last ones.
  6. Bake crowded and hot. Set them sides touching in a greased 10-inch cast iron skillet or on a tray. Bake 15 to 18 minutes, until the tops are deep brown and a biscuit lifted from the middle is dry where it touched its neighbour.
  7. Butter them hot. Brush the tops with melted butter as they come out and eat them within the hour. This is not a keeping bread.
Flat, heavy biscuits with a sour edge mean the soda was short or the sponge over-ripe — next time cut the overnight rest to eight hours and measure the soda level rather than heaped. A soapy taste means the opposite, too much soda for the acid that was actually there, and there is no fixing that batch. If the dough is too wet to cut, do not add flour by the handful; drop it in twelve spoonfuls into the hot skillet instead and take the split tops as they come, which is what the wagon cook did anyway.

Storage and make-ahead

They are best within an hour and acceptable for a day, kept in a cloth rather than plastic. Split and toast anything left.

They freeze well raw: cut, freeze on a tray, bag, and bake from frozen at 450°F for 20 to 22 minutes. Baked and frozen they come back dry.

What to serve with it

The chuckwagon beans on this site, which is the pairing the documents actually support.

Failing that, sausage gravy, or a fried egg and a slice of bacon. The sourness holds up to fat better than a buttermilk biscuit does.

From the recipe box / Wyoming

Chuckwagon Sourdough Biscuits

An overnight sourdough sponge cut with cold fat and lifted the next morning by soda meeting the acid the night put there, baked hard and fast in a cast iron pan.

Prep
25 min, plus an overnight sponge
Cook
18 min
Total
45 min, plus 8 to 12 hours fermenting
Serves
12
Calories
205 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. The night before, stir the starter, buttermilk and 2 cups of the flour to a thick batter, cover, and leave 8–12 hours.
  2. Heat the oven to 450°F. Rub the cold fat into the remaining 1 cup flour with the salt and sugar until the pieces are pea-sized.
  3. Sprinkle the soda over that mixture, tip it onto the sponge, and fold 8–10 times until no dry flour shows.
  4. Turn out onto a floured board, pat 1 inch thick, fold in three and pat out again — twice.
  5. Cut 12 biscuits with a 2½-inch cutter, pressing straight down without twisting.
  6. Bake sides touching in a greased 10-inch cast iron skillet, 15–18 minutes, until deep brown.
  7. Brush with melted butter and serve hot.

Nutrition

Fat9 g (4 g saturated)
Sodium390 mg
Protein5 g
Serving1 biscuit
Calories205
Cholesterol16 mg
Carbohydrates26 g (2 g sugar, 1 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

What if I have no starter?

Then make baking-powder biscuits and do not pretend otherwise; the choice is an old one. Rollins in 1922 has the cowboy carrying "either a bottle of sour dough or a can of baking-powder", which means the tin was already the honest alternative a hundred years ago. Use 1 tablespoon of baking powder, replace the sponge with 1¼ cups of buttermilk, and skip the overnight rest.

Can I bake these in a Dutch oven over a fire?

That is where they come from, and the control is the difficulty. You want few coals underneath and many on the lid, so the top browns before the bottoms burn, and you want to look early and often. Rollins's description of the one-man version — pan on the coals until a crust forms, then tipped on edge away from the fire to let the bread rise, then pushed back to brown — is the same sequence in a frying pan, and it tells you what the cook was managing: bottom heat first, then lift, then colour.

Why does my sourdough taste vinegary rather than tangy?

Because of the balance of the two acids the bacteria make. The USDA laboratory that isolated them found the acetic acid running anywhere "from 3 to 26% of the total", the rest being lactic. Cooler, wetter, more frequently fed starters sit at the lactic end and taste milder; warm, stiff, neglected ones drift to the acetic end and taste of vinegar. Feed twice a day for two days before you bake and the flavour moves.

Can I leave the soda out and let the starter do everything?

You can, and you will get a flatter, distinctly sour biscuit with a tighter crumb. The soda is doing two things at once, and the 1916 Army manual names the first of them — it is "used to neutralize acids found in sour dough" — while the gas that reaction throws off does the second. A pure starter-risen biscuit needs a proper warm proof after shaping, an hour or more, and is a different item.