1.29.2012

An unconventional method for making biscuits results in puff pastry, and we're glad about that.

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A big motivation for this site is from the question "what's the recipe?"  Few questions overwhelm me to point of being speechless.  A recipe is a list of ingredients, to put them together is a bigger proposition.  I used to go into the details, then I perceived the trapped person glazing over and I realized the person asking was simply trying to give a compliment but wasn't really interested in the preparation.  The website was an easy way to get off the hook.  I could point them to the site and details.

It's Sunday and that's often a morning of biscuits and fruit.  My typical biscuit prep is 300 g flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, salt, a T sugar, cut in butter (100 g) and moisten with 180 grams liquid (water or milk), mix, fold a few times, cut in circles, bake at 450.

Today, since I was in croissant mode, I took a different tack with the same biscuit ingredients and stumbled on something nice.  I made a dough mixed from water (90 g), flour (150 g), salt (3 g), sugar (1T) and baking powder (2t) - which could just have easily been made from self rise flour (150 g) and water (90 g).  That was kneeded in a bread machine while I made a 55 gram butter pat in a small ziploc bag using my butter trick.  The dough and butter were treated just as in the croissant method (albeit much smaller rectangles, but still 81 layers) and cut into squares.

It was a lean dough, leavened with just baking powder.  Butter was then added, and the folding/chilling/rolling went off in about 15 minutes.  I cut the final dough into 6 cubes and baked at 450F.  The delectable morsels are depicted above.  They were reminiscent of puff pastry (obviously not as thin, but just as delicate) and are going to be a serious building block for all sorts of stuff, popovers for starters!

1 comment:

Diana said...

Looks yummy.