Basics: Scones

I have two recipes for you today: Plain Scones, and Bacon Scones with Maple Sugar.

The first thing I realized about scones is that there’s not really anything particularly amusing to say about them. I’ve been trying for a week now to come up with some clever or witty take on scones, and I come up short every time. It’s not like they’re an object of ridicule, nor do they require a particularly challenging technique that can be unwittingly executed incorrectly with hilarious results. They’re just a fairly basic quick bread. So for Plain Scones, I fear I have nothing diverting to offer.

This recipe makes eight very simple, very mildly flavored scones. They’re the recipe to use if you’ve made your own jam (or been given some). If you want to pep them up with dried fruit (blueberries or cherries) or other flavorings (cinnamon, perhaps), you could. I went with a very basic nutmeg, which I grate fresh using a little grater I have, and grate until the dusting of nutmeg is visible on top of the flour. Then I pulse it in. It amounts to probably two two-finger pinches. You can use more or less, depending on your affinity for nutmeg.

Although the flavor is mild, the texture tends to the soft side. The bit of sugar over the top gives them a nice crunch and a bit of contrast. This is a good recipe to memorize (and not hard to do either, since almost everything is in quantities of two) and be able to whip up quickly on a Sunday morning when it turns out it’s much nicer outside than you thought it would be, and everyone decides to sit out on the porch and have coffee or tea. Appear 25 minutes later with a plate of scones and some nice jam, when everyone is just ready for their second cup of coffee, and you’ll be a hero.

Now, the bacon scones actually have a bit of a backstory. Not a ton, I don’t want you to get your hopes up too high, but more than the Plain Scones. The idea for these came out of a passing remark. A batch of the plain scones was in the oven, and my husband walked in and said, “Bacon scones?” I said, “No, regular scones.” He said, “They smell like bacon scones.” When he tasted them, I asked him what he thought. “Not enough bacon,” was the response. OK, OK, I get it.

Naturally, my first move was to post about it on FB: “Bacon scones: a good idea, or a disaster waiting to happen?” One friend commented that they would probably need a maple glaze of some kind. I remembered a bottle of granulated maple sugar I had picked up some time ago. This happens—I’ll buy non-perishable ingredients and just hang on to them until they come in handy. I scattered a bit of the sugar over the tops while they were baking, and realized when I tasted them that the sugar needed to be in the scones, as well as on them.

The second batch was perfect. Which makes a sort of a dull story in the end—I told you not to get your hopes up—but a really excellent scone.

However, a couple of comments on ingredients:

I use a very thick cut bacon for these. This recipe has five primary ingredients—if any one of them is less than great, it will be apparent. So I use my “best” bacon for them. I also cook it in the oven. I’ve never been able to figure out why everyone doesn’t do this, but I know people who don’t. I think the bacon gets crisper (I like really crisp bacon), and there’s less mess. Although I don’t, you can even cook it on a rack over a pan and let the fat drip down away from the bacon, making it “healthier” (theoretically). You do need a rimmed baking sheet (but a 9 x 13” roasting pan would do fine), and I use nonstick foil. It goes in a 400 degree oven for about 25 minutes. I drain it immediately, and it crisps up so I can crumble it.

Granulated maple sugar, which is really key in these, is hella expensive. It runs about $20 a pound at my grocery store. You can order it from The King Arthur Flour Company. Eight ounces will set you back about ten bucks, plus shipping. The good thing is you don’t need much, and it keeps for a really long time. The King Arthur website has lots of uses for it, if you decide you don’t want to keep it hanging around. Of you could use it the way you use Turbinado sugar (sometimes sold as Sugar in the Raw)—use it on cookies or muffins to add a little crunch. It has the benefit of adding the maple flavor as well. If you don’t have the maple sugar, you could try using brown sugar, or Turbinado sugar. I didn’t try the recipe with either of these, so I can’t certify your results, but if you go that route, I’d be interested in hearing if they’re successful.

So there you have it: one basic recipe, and one amped up recipe. Not as much in the way of chat as accompany some other recipes, perhaps, but that’s how it is sometimes.

Plain Scones
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
2 tablespoons butter, cut into cubes
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon Turbinado sugar

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F
2. In a food processor, combine flour, baking powder, sugar, nutmeg, and salt. Pulse 2-3 times to combine
3. Scatter butter cubes over top of flour mixture. Pulse 8-10 times until butter is in small pieces (it will be barely visible in with the flour).
4. With the motor running, pour the cream into the flour mixture, and continue pulsing until barely combined. The mixture will seem a bit damp and clumpy.
5. Turn dough out onto a floured board or counter top. Pat into a circle about 7” across and about ½” – ¾” thick. Using a knife or a bench scraper, cut the circle into 8 wedges. Place the wedges on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
7. Using a pastry brush or small spoon, and the last of the cream in the measuring cup, brush the top of each wedge with cream, and scatter with 1 tablespoon of Turbinado sugar.
8. Bake 20-22 minutes, or until golden. Remove from oven and cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Bacon Scones with Maple Sugar
4 – 5 strips thick cut bacon, cooked very crisp, crumbled
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons + 1 tablespoon granulated maple sugar
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons butter, cut into cubes
1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F
2. In a food processor, combine flour, baking powder, 2 tablespoons maple sugar, regular sugar, and salt. Pulse 2-3 times to combine.
3. Scatter butter cubes over top of flour mixture. Pulse 8-10 times until butter is in small pieces (it will be barely visible in with the flour).
4. With the motor running, pour the cream into the flour mixture, and continue pulsing until barely combined. The mixture will seem a bit damp and clumpy.
5. Scatter the dough with the bacon crumbles and pulse 5-6 times to distribute evenly.
6. Turn dough out onto a floured board or counter top. Pat into a circle about 7” across and about ½” – ¾” thick. Using a knife or a bench scraper, cut the circle into 8 wedges. Place the wedges on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
7. Using a pastry brush or small spoon, and the last of the cream in the measuring cup, brush the top of each wedge with cream, and scatter with 1 tablespoon of granulated maple sugar.
8. Bake 20-22 minutes, or until golden. Remove from oven and cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Starters: Roasted Beets with Blue Cheese, Hazelnuts, and Sour Cream Dressing

Poor beets. They are much maligned, that despised vegetable of childhood. So much abuse leveled at them: they’re old people food, they taste like dirt, they’re spongy, they’re just boring.

I won’t defend canned beets. In my opinion canned beets deserve the criticism they receive. But fresh beets are quite different. It’s like in high school when you meet your archenemy’s older sibling and discover that, while your archenemy is a jerk, his or her sibling is actually a nice person and you get along really well with them. It makes you wonder if they have the same parents, or if one of them was adopted.

I spent years avoiding beets. I breezed past them on salad bars without a second look. They were those jerky canned beets. No way. Then one evening, at a very nice restaurant, I met cubed roasted golden beets. They were actually a garnish on something or other, and I decided to try them.

I have a theory about food. If there’s something I think I don’t like, or haven’t had an opportunity to taste (let’s be honest: often people say, “I don’t like X,” when what they mean is, “I’ve never had X,” or, “I had X that someone made at a party once and it tasted bad,” or, “I’m not sure how to prepare X, so I never have”), I make a point of trying it at a really good restaurant. My thinking is that if a good restaurant can’t make a disliked or feared ingredient taste good, we’re probably just not meant to be. This method has served me well. I ate cream of mushroom soup and developed an appreciation for mushrooms, and tried oysters on the half shell and came to see how good they can be, among other things.

So here I was, in a quite nice restaurant, with roasted cubed yellow beets before me. They were a world away from those nasty canned beets of my childhood (which were served, I recall, with instant mashed potatoes, and a hamburger patty with American cheese on it—no bun, just a patty with cheese. All of which could possibly—although not completely—account for my aversion to beets). So I tasted these and was immediately smitten.

I started experimenting with fresh beets, and found a new friend. I like them roasted with just a little olive oil, and then cubed, and possibly sautéed in a touch more oil, seasoned with salt and pepper.

But one day, I started musing. This is something else I do. I muse. An ingredient will pop into my head—beets, polenta, halibut—and I’ll start turning over things to do with it. I’ll start running through other ingredients that might go with the one. It’s almost like a slot machine—the potential pairing ingredients will roll past (not quite as quickly as a slot machine, of course) and then all of a sudden, it’ll be a *chunk*chunk*chunk* and a combination will present itself. Sometimes I’ll keep one and discard the other two and start the process over. Sometimes all three or four will strike me as a winner. Then I start experimenting.

This is how this beet concoction came to be. I suppose it’s technically a salad. Something in my head said, “Roasted beets. Blue cheese. Hazelnuts. Sour cream. Dijon mustard. White wine vinegar.” So I tried it. I roasted and cubed the beets, combined sour cream, Dijon mustard and white wine vinegar, scattered the cubed beets with the cheese and the nuts, drizzled over the dressing, and was completely won over.

I took this to work for lunch and heated up the beets in the microwave (not ideal, but cooking facilities at my office are somewhat limited, obviously). I made it at home and reheated the beets in a pan on the stove with the merest splash of olive oil to keep them from sticking to the pan, and they were a delight.

I think one of the reasons people think beets taste like dirt is that they sometimes do. My grocery store sells only organically grown beets. More often than not, they’re caked in mud (and can someone please explain to me why America equates, “organic” with, “filthy”? It seems to me that all organic produce I encounter in grocery stores is encrusted with vast quantities of dirt. I don’t get this.) As a result, if you don’t scrub beets really well—and I mean really well—they will taste like dirt, because they’ll be lightly dusted with soil. To use a term coined by one of my six year olds, roasted soil is undelicious. Ew.

So scrub your beets really well. You can use any color beet you like—plain old magenta ones, golden ones, or the striped ones called Chioggia. The blue cheese I use is a moderately priced “Amish” blue cheese. This is strange, since I live thousands of miles from the nearest Amish person, but even if they’re imposters, they make decent blue cheese. You want a firm blue cheese that crumbles—Maytag blue is the texture you’re looking for, and it’s available most places. The hazelnuts are just hazelnuts. Buy them in the bulk section already skinned and chopped, and save yourself the chore of roasting, skinning, and chopping them.

As for the dressing, thin the sour cream to a drizzling consistency with white wine vinegar. You don’t want it too bitey, just enough to mellow the sour cream so it’s not too rich. The Dijon adds an extra dimension of flavor. If you’re serving this to guests, you can make everything up ahead of time—beets, dressing, cheese and nuts—but keep them separate until you serve. If you use regular beets (as opposed to golden beets), the dressing will turn pink, which is fine if you’re scraping up the last of it with your fork, but not so nice if the plate is just being set down in front of you.

I’m providing quantities, but you can also use your appetite, guests, menu, and palate as a guide. If you’re having this as a starter before a heavy winter meal, you might want to go lighter on the cheese and nuts, so everyone doesn’t fill up. If you’re using this in a transitional menu (a winter/spring one in which you’re serving something a little more delicate than a big stew or a braise, for instance) you could be a little more generous with the toppings to make sure no one goes home hungry. The same goes for the dressing—taste and see what you think. Too tart? More sour cream. Not assertive enough? A little more vinegar and perhaps another teaspoon of Dijon.

If your only experience with beets has been with canned ones, be assured that when you taste fresh beets, there will be hardly any resemblance. You’ll wonder if they even have the same parents as those jerky canned ones.

Roasted Beets with Blue Cheese, Hazelnuts and Sour Cream Dressing
Serves 4-6 as a starter

Salad

4 medium beets (about 1 pound, greens removed)
Olive oil
2 ounces crumbly blue cheese, crumbled
¼ cup chopped hazelnuts
Baby arugula or baby spinach for serving (optional)

Dressing
4 tablespoons sour cream
2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2-3 teaspoons white wine vinegar

Directions
1) Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Scrub beets very well with a brush, and dry with a towel.

2) In a small pan (you can even use an ovenproof skillet) pour a little olive oil. Add the beets, and roll them around to coat with the oil. Pour over a little more oil, if necessary to coat completely.

3) Cover the pan with aluminum foil and roast for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of your beets. (A note about beet size and roasting times, the variation of the former of which will greatly influence the latter: My beets, generally, are about the size of an average woman’s fist. Four beets of this size is about a pound. However, you may sometimes find ones that are smaller. In this case, you’ll want to roast them a shorter time. A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to stick a fork into them, but it should resist a little. If it just slides in the way it would into a baked potato, they’re overdone. Start checking big ones at 30 minutes, smaller ones at 15).

4) Allow the beets to cool until they can just be handled, then rub the skin off with a piece of paper towel. If you let them cool too far, and the skins resist rubbing off, just get out your vegetable peeler and peel them. Beets have skin like carrots—very thin and easily scraped
off.

5) Cut off the root and top ends of the beets and cut into ¼-1/2” cubes. Set aside

6) For the dressing, in a small bowl, combine the sour cream and Dijon mustard. Stir to combine. Add in the white wine vinegar, a little salt and a little pepper. Taste and adjust seasoning. Set aside.

7) If you decide to do the beets well ahead, you’ll need to reheat them. To do this, heat a teaspoon or so of olive oil in a medium skillet, and add the beets. Allow the beets to just heat through, tossing from time to time to keep them from sticking.

8) To serve, you can put down a small bed of baby arugula or baby spinach, if desired. On each plate, mound up some beets, and season lightly with a little salt and pepper (just a pinch of each per plate). Scatter with blue cheese and hazelnuts, and drizzle with a tablespoon or so of dressing.

9) Serve immediately.