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.

Basics: Two Ingredient Bread

A little over 15 years ago, my mother in law died very suddenly. This was, as you can imagine, hard on everyone, but it was particularly hard on my father in law, and for reasons beyond the obvious lonely/sad that comes with the loss of someone who’s been part of your life for most of your adulthood. My mother in law, as is the case for so many men of his generation, was his conduit to the world. She arranged his social life, sent out the Christmas cards, and was the primary point of contact for their kids.

She was the one who called us, extended invitations for holidays, organized family gatherings when we were visiting. She knew what was going on in our lives and what we were planning—buying and selling houses, changing jobs, etc. With her gone, my father in law really didn’t know how to connect with us.

As he struggled to forge a different kind of relationship with Alex and me, he sought a common interest among the three of us, and settled on food. The problem is, my father in law is a really bad cook. Alex describes his “signature dish” from their childhood, which evidently consisted of a can of corned beef hash mixed with ketchup and a few other components (after the canned hash and the ketchup, I’m always too nauseous to absorb the rest of the ingredient list, so I can’t tell you what’s in it beyond that, but really, does it matter? Ick). This food (I use the term loosely) was known as “Special Dish” and was evidently the pinnacle of my father in law’s culinary abilities.

So our conversations about food were primarily limited to his descriptions of what was currently in his refrigerator, along with what kind of soup he’d recently made or was planning to make. With my mother in law gone, he became an almost fanatical consumer of soup, it seemed. Any and every ingredient was fair game. I remember his coming for Fourth of July one year and Alex made, as he did every year, a big pot of dirty rice to take to an annual party. At the end of the party, there was still quite a lot left, and my father in law lamented that he couldn’t take it home and make soup out of it.

On a related note, he was also notoriously bad about throwing things out that were past their prime. During one visit, my sister in law and I decided that we couldn’t bear the fug of the refrigerator any longer, and launched a campaign to clean it out. He agreed, but insisted on overseeing the operation. Things went fairly well until we came to a little Styrofoam bowl of mashed potatoes. As we pulled them out, he kept insisting that those were “perfectly good” and that they were “just from when Shirley was here!” (Shirley being my husband’s aunt, and her visit had happened a good six weeks earlier. "That's just from when Shirley was here!" has become a catchphrase in our family, used when disposing of leftovers or containers of ingredients that are past their prime.) My sister in law made the mistake of opening them and actually taking a whiff, causing her to lunge for the sink, unsure if she was going to be sick, and to immediately dump the offending potatoes down the drain. She said later she had no idea why she’d bothered to smell them, as the green fuzz growing all over them left not a shadow of a doubt as to their fate. Doubtless they would have found their way into a pot of soup if we hadn’t intervened.

All of this is a very roundabout way of getting to the recipe I have for you. Not unlike my earlier ramblings on Christmas cookies, these stories and this recipe have only the most tenuous of connections. The recipe is for the world’s simplest bread. It’s two ingredients, and both of them are cheap and easy to come by. If you can turn on the oven and stir, you can make this bread. It’s great hot from the oven, but also makes good toast if you have it left the next day. I urge you to use the cheapest beer you have for this. Anything with any real distinctive flavor is going to make the beer taste in the bread too strong. When I was in college, we went to the grocery store and happened on generic beer. It came in white cans and had the word “BEER” written in black letters on it. If you can find this, it would be perfect. Budweiser or PBR is fine too. The flour must be self-rising. Regular all-purpose won’t do the trick. You should be able to find self-rising flour along with all the other flours in the grocery store. And don’t bother adding salt either. Self-rising flour has salt already in it, along with the leavening it contains.

I love this bread because it means we can have hot bread with dinner on a cold night with very little effort. You can leave it plain, or you can jazz it up with a couple of handfuls of shredded cheddar cheese, or some chopped herbs, depending on what you’re having with it (of course, then it’s no longer two ingredient bread). It’s nice with chili, stew, or even soup, if that’s what you happen to be having. Too bad I never thought to give my father in law this recipe when he was in his soup phase all those years ago.

Two Ingredient Bread
Makes 1 loaf

2 ½ cups self-rising flour
1 can (12 oz) cheap beer

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Grease a loaf pan (mine is about 8 ½” x 4 ½”—you can use any size you like, even two smaller ones, but if you use one substantially larger, your loaf will be wider and shorter as the batter spreads to fill the pan).
2. In a large bowl, combine the flour with the beer. Turn the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
3. Bake about 40-50 minutes. The loaf will sound hollow when you knock on the bottom, but really, if your oven is reasonably accurate, after about 45 minutes, this bread will be done. It’s such a cinchy thing to make that I don’t want to stress you out by even worrying about knocking the bottom of loaves, or checking it with skewers or thermometers.
4. Allow to sit for about ten minutes, then slice and serve.