Question about making scones (cake, sugar, baking, chocolate)
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I'd love to have fresh made scones for breakfast some weekend morning but I'm not very eager to start baking early in the morning. So, I'm wondering, if anyone knows, if it's okay to make the dough the night before and let it sit over night? If so, should the dough be kept in the fridge or out on the counter?
Scones, like pie crusts and cakes, are about minimizing gluten. Gluten forms when flour is mixed with water (or milk, which has a lot of water in it). The trick is to avoid overworking the dough and to get it into the oven as soon as possible.
Anything that has a lot of sugar (like chocolate chip cookie dough) can sit around a long time because the sugar inhibits gluten formation.
Long story short: Yes, you can refrigerate unbaked scones, but they won’t be as tender or rise as high.
I had a roommate from college who was from the UK. She used to make scones almost daily. She could whip up a batch in 10 minutes (not including baking).
Scones, like pie crusts and cakes, are about minimizing gluten. Gluten forms when flour is mixed with water (or milk, which has a lot of water in it). The trick is to avoid overworking the dough and to get it into the oven as soon as possible.
Good points. I'd add that choosing the right flour helps. Cake flour is lower gluten than bread flour. Bread needs gluten to stretch and hold the bubbles that form so the bread is light, but cake wants to be tender, so cake and pastry flour has less gluten.
The King Arthur recipe I posted calls for Unbleached All-Purpose Flour. All-Purpose is sort of a compromise between cake and bread flours, so if you only use a small amount of flour this is the kind to get. An unbleached means that it is a light tan in color, rather than being chemically bleached to be white. It's healthier than bleached flour, and who cares if scones are tan?
It’s absolutely essential to use unbleached flour in scones and biscuits. Bleached flour has a slightly metallic taste. You don’t notice it in cookies because of the sugar, but it really stands out in scones and biscuits.
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