[Sca-cooks] Two questions

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sat Sep 12 06:12:17 PDT 2009


On Sep 12, 2009, at 8:57 AM, Terry Decker wrote:

> That's clotted cream rather than just cream.  It's a semi-solid  
> similar to butter.

Always reminded me of a better-tasting toothpaste...

> 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.

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






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter




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