[Sca-cooks] Two questions
Terry Decker
t.d.decker at att.net
Sat Sep 12 10:38:10 PDT 2009
>> These days tou are more likely to find it on the shortbread rather than
>> in it.
>>
>> You now have me wondering about the evolution of shortbread and whether
>> or not this recipe is technically biscuit, as it first bakes the flour,
>> then bakes the fine cake.
>
> It does looks as if someone, somewhere, made the logical leap and figured
> out that excess water leads to gluten development and toughness. This
> just appears to be a sort of bass-ackwards (by modern viewpoint) method
> of addressing that. Dry the flour and use clotted cream, rather than
> butter, which still has a bit less water in it than clotted cream.
>
Baking the flour coagulates the gluten and produces a "nuttier" flavor.
And yeah, it does reduce the water content. That makes a lot of sense in
terms of this recipe.
> I'm not sure if I'd go with the biscuit comparison: if the second baking
> is, as usually seems the case, a means of preserving and/or rendering
> more palatable previously baked item -- for example, anisette toasts, or
> something like that, where you bake a loaf, slice it, and then bake the
> slices till hard, brittle, crisp, and just slightly browned.
>
> How about this: if you had to toast fresh seeds (as is done in some
> confit recipes, for example), and then add them to anise bisket, would
> they be triscuits? A less frivolous question would be, does baking an
> ingredient constitute part of the theoretically mandatory twice- cooking
> of biscuit, which normally calls for twice-cooking the entire product in
> some form?
>
> Adamantius
I'm a little curious about how biscuit came to be used for all things cookie
like in GB and I was thinking off the top of my uncaffienated head when I
wrote that. Still it is an interesting question.
Triskets? That's an interesting idea.
Beqar
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