Return of the Scone: We Can Rebuild It

Okay, it was time to start rebuilding my scone recipe from scratch -- pun completely intended. I had to two tricks up my sleeve to control the gluten and get a better tasting, scone like texture 1) use corn meal in addition to flour 2) replace some of the butter with Laughing Cow Cheese Original Swiss.

The first time I tried this recipe I used applesauce to replace the butter and I think that made the dough more of a batter. Still, with nothing more than instinct to go on I still felt the mashed up fruit had its part to play. I decided I would still use some of it, but far less than my first attempt at creating the scone.

There was also a flavor issue. My first recipe was bland, bland, bland. I completely understood why the texture was all wrong, but why so little taste? I used splenda in place of sugar so there should have been no issue in terms of sweetness. Now, there are two things that I believe to always be true in the kitchen. When cooking you can't go wrong with garlic, oil or basil. When baking you can't go wrong adding vanilla. (I don't think I'm the first or only person to come to these conclusions. But, sometimes you just have to say it.) Obviously garlic, oil and basil were not going into my sweet scone recipe. That left vanilla.

I made one more change. Instead of splenda I was going to use honey. There was no real reason to do this other than I wanted to.

So, here is my basic list of ingredients:
Whole Wheat Flour (again I decided to use whole wheat instead of white just because)
Corn Meal
Baking Powder
Salt
Laughing Cow Cheese
Egg, separated
Honey
applesauce
Milk (I didn't have buttermilk on hand so I just went with milk)
vanilla

Great I have a recipe list, but what to do with all of it? This is where the difference between baking and cooking comes in. There are techniques that certainly should be applied in cooking (don't crowd the pan; brown your meat before braising or putting it in a slow cooker; let your meat rest before slicing into; oil, garlic and basil are universally a good thing.) But, with cooking you can improvise a lot. In baking you have to get the ingredients in the right proportion or instead of dough you have batter. (Hence the scone failure of October 2009.)

So, I did some research and learned that the average scone recipe has a dry to wet ratio of 3:1. So, I pulled out my scale and started adding my dry ingredients in until all together they weight about 215 grams. Using the scone ratio my goal was to hit 71 grams of wet ingredients. started measuring out my wet ingredients on the scale starting with the egg yolk because that weights what it's gong to weight. As a complete guess I added a 1/4 cup of honey, 1 tsp of vanilla, 4 tbls of applesauce and 1/4 cup of milk. This came out to way more than 71 grams of wet ingredients. It was more like 174 grams. To get back to the proper ratio I added more flour.

And now it was before me. The moment where last time everything went so wrong: mixing the wet and dry ingredients together. I'll admit I was a little nervous about this. What if everything was a batter-like mess again. Or what if there was not enough liquid? Did I have the guts to add a little bit more incrementally to get to the right place? And If by adding extra liquid would I overwork the dough creating too much gluten again. Still, if I was going to do this, it would have to be done. I would have to mix my wet and dry ingredients together. I took a deep breath and with a small pause started to tip my bowl of wet in order to pour its contents into my flour/corn meal mixture.

And then I stopped remembering I had left out an important part of the experiment. I had yet to cut in the laughing cow cheese! Thankfully I remembered before any of the wet concoction mixed with the dry. Treating the laughing cow like butter I cut it into the flour mixture. Once I had a good large crumb formed, I added the wet ingrediants and mixed. And by the end I had a good, scone like dough. Yay!

I formed the dough into a nice round and sliced into triangles. I moved the slices apart slightly so I could have a crisper edge. Baked at 375 degrees for 25 minutes.

The results: Yummy. Tasted like a scone and was the right texture. Overall I was happy with this attempt. BUT still haven't gotten the recipe under 200 calories and I'm thinking I'd like to make it dairy free. So, will have to play with this a bit more. Below is the recipe.

Ingredients
327 grams whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup corn meal
1/4 tsp salt
18 grams egg yolk
3 grams vanilla
53 grams honey
75 grams applesauce
25 grams 2% milk
1/2 tsp water
4 wedges laughing cow cheese

Return of the Scone: The Baker fights back

Okay, so after a short break, a little research and a dash of thought I decided to once again tackle the challenge of making the better for me scone. (I'm dropping the lower fat, lower calorie, better for me because it's a lot to type. But, don't worry, the goal is still to be all of those things.)

So, after the first round I can honestly say that what I made was nothing like a scone. It seemed the traditional full butter recipe had won the battle. But, I was not about to retreat. I want it all: good tasting, passes for scone but doesn't kill my daily calorie count scone. I knew the major problem with my first attempt was too many wet ingredients. That was really an easy fix, don't use as much buttermilk (or milk but more on that later.) The other issue was controlling the gluten and this is where watching Good Eats with Alton Brown came in handy.

Mr Brown, masterful chef that he is, did an episode on pie crust. In it he suggested using corn meal to help give the crust more crunch and keep a nice balance between flaky and tender. Hmmm this sounded promising. I also remember an episode where he talked about using corn meal as a means of controlling gluten. So, I decided that I would substitute some of my flour for corn meal.

This all seemed very promising, but I had a bigger problem at hand: replacing the butter. Last time I attempted to use applesauce and the results were flavorful. But, I wondered if just using an item that is so different from butter was ever going to create the right texture. I considered using oil but fat wise that hardly seemed better than butter. And then, like so many creative endeavors, while letting my mind wander one night it hit me. There was something that I often used as a spread, much like butter, that was low calorie, low fat and diet friendly: Laughing Cow Cheese.

At 35 calories per wedge laughing cow is a dieters best friend. Now, I wasn't so naive (or foolish?) to think that laughing cow alone would take the place of butter. I'm sure there are all sorts of molecular differences between butter and processed cheese. But, still something told me that this may just be the thing to make my scones.

Next time: how I built the recipe