How To: Make Perfect Scones
 Source Our Best Bites Recipe Added: 1/1/2013
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~ Preheat the oven. Adjust the oven rack to the lower-middle position. The dough has enough sugar that close proximity to the heat could produce dark bottoms.
~ Measure the dry ingredients into a bowl, add the butter, then favorite dried fruit, and then stir in the liquid ingredients. The dough is ready to shape. ~ There are several ways to incorporate butter into the dry ingredients for scones, biscuits or pie dough: fingertips, pastry cutter, or the grating disk of a food processor. For a small batch of scones, grating frozen butter on a box grater is much easier than any of those methods. For a larger batch, use the food processor bowl. ~ Make sure the butter is frozen solid. Any softer and it will clog up the grater, clump together, and not mix well with the dry ingredients; and the scones won't rise as high or be as flaky. Store some butter in the freezer to have some at hand. ~ To save time in the morning, mix and freeze the dry ingredients (with the incorporated butter) and refrigerate the egg/liquid mixture the night before. The next morning, simply mix, form, cut and bake. ~ To keep the dough as cold as possible during mixing, stir it with a fork until clumps form. At that point, switch to your hand, pressing the clumps together and against the side of the bowl to form a ball. Because there's a minimum of liquid in the recipe (so the scones rise up, not out, as they bake), you may be tempted to add more liquid, but don't. There should be enough liquid to bind the dough. If any crumbs linger, flick a few drops of water onto them and use the dough ball to pick them up. ~ No need for a rolling pin. Just pat the ball into a disk, sprinkle with a little sugar, and cut it into wedges. You can double the recipe, but divide the dough in half to pat out and cut. Otherwise you'll end up with a big disk and long, skinny scones. |
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