Back to Basics

Last week biscuit baking was on the agenda when a student came for a one-to-one class to get his biscuits right.

A lengthy email correspondence ensued prior to meeting in which he explained how the biscuits seemed to lack the anticipated hardness/ crispiness / ‘biscuitiness’. He had resorted to putting the dough in to a fairy cake tin to contain it when cooking as when he put the walnut-sized raw dough balls onto a baking tray, they just spread into each other whilst cooking.  After baking, they remained soft and seemed unlikely to last for very long.

I made the biscuits beforehand following the ingredients and instructions. They came out perfectly!! What had I done different?

It came down to method. Having a slight thing about unwanted noise I made the biscuits by hand using a very quiet wooden spoon. How else am I able to continue to listen to the radio? And this was the key (the wooden spoon, not the radio).  As with making a light sponge cake, at the beginning it is desirable to beat the butter and sugar very hard to get a light creamy mixture. Continue this method as you add the eggs so the you have a fluffy light texture in the bowl.

Then SLOW DOWN as you add your flour, ground nuts, semolina, or rice. This is where the expression cut and fold comes into play. All you want to do is to combine the dry ingredients until no crumbs or dry bits show any more.

The dough ball was soft but not sticky and it was possible to make round dough balls that retained their shape in cooking or could even be rolled out and shapes cut out or even shoved into a piping bag to create shaped biscuits.

My friend had been making the dough in a large blender and whisking the flour and other dry ingredients for a few minutes after he had mixed the butter, sugar and eggs. This ‘over-beating’ had created a very sticky dough which when cooked almost produced a biscuit/cake mixture.

I am not advocating we all go back to making everything by hand – life is far too short for that. But perhaps when trying a new baking recipe go back to basics. Feel your materials and understand how they react under different conditions. Then you can experiment, adapt for different machinery, using alternative ingredients and move forward.

You cannot expect the machine to instinctively know what to do, we humans still have a role to play.