The holiday season brought me ample time and a well-stocked, usable kitchen. I was thinking of things to do to kill time, and baking comes to mind.
On New Year's Eve, I got a text from my brother asking whether I would like to head to his friend's place for a Space Needle firework viewing New Year's Eve party. The conversation went approximately as follow:
Bro: Friend has a New Year's Eve party. Wanna come? By the way, are you making scones?
Me: Yeah. I was planning to test some substitutions on a recipe.
Bro: What are the scones for?
Me: Killing time?
Bro: That reminds me: I need to bring some stuff to the party and I don't know what to bring...
Me: I can make extra...
Bro: Can you? By the way, is this plain or with stuff in it?
Me: Cranberry oats.
So... That's how I got committed into making the scones. I was a bit hesitant because this is truly a new test recipe that I haven't tried and I'm about the release the kraken...
The exact recipe I used is as follow. This should cut about 16 normal size scones, or 24 mini scones. See the description after the procedure on how to simplify the recipe.
340 g Whole wheat bread flour (~ 2.4 C)
150 g Flax seed meal (~ 1.1 C)
100 g Sugar (~1/2 C)
1/2 t Salt
1.5 t Baking soda
2 t Baking powder
5/8 C Unsalted butter, cold (that's about 1 stick plus 2 tablespoons)
6 T Virgin coconut oil, room temperature (solid)
120 g Rolled oats (~1.5 C)
2 Zest of oranges, chopped into fine shreds. No white parts from the orange please!
1 C Plain Greek Yogurt
1/2 C Milk
1 C Dried cranberries
1/4 - 1/2 C Coarse sugar (demerara, sugar-in-the-raw works great)
Now, the procedure:
1. Coat the dried cranberries and orange zest with a little bit of bread flour
2. Mix bread flour, flax seed meal, salt, sugar (not the coarse sugar), baking powder, baking soda, and rolled oats together
3. Add dried cranberries and orange zest to #2. Mix.
4. Cut butter and coconut oil to small pieces and dump into #3
5. Using your hands or pastry cutter, knead the butter and coconut oil into #3. Make sure the fats are thoroughly cut into #3. If it's properly kneaded, you should be able to form the mixture in the fist of your hands when you squeeze on it.
6. If it's hot outside, place #5 in the fridge to chill so that the fats would solidify again.
7. Mix Greek yogurt and milk together until smooth
8. Preheat your oven to 375F. Line baking trays with parchment paper.
9. Pour a thin layer of coarse sugar on a flat plate and set it next to your dough-working station. 10. Mix #5 with #7 with your hands until the dough just formed. Adjust liquid level as need to make sure the dough is not sticky or too dry. DO NOT OVER-KNEAD!
11. Toss #10 onto a lightly floured working surface. Cut #10 into somewhere between 16 - 24 pieces in the shapes you like. I usually do round disks or triangles.
12. Press the pieces from #11 onto the plate of coarse sugar individually. Try to press and coat around all sides except the bottom. Place sugar-coated pieces onto baking trays. Add more coarse sugar onto the plate as-needed.
13. Put baking trays in the oven for ~15 - 20 minutes, or until the scones are done.
As you can see, the recipe is a bit more complicated than normal. You can make the following changes below to turn the recipe into a simpler one:
A. Replace whole wheat bread flour and flax seed meal entirely with all purpose flour.
B. Replace virgin coconut oil with butter
C. Replace milk and plain Greek yogurt with plain drinkable kefir, and adjust the total liquid level down to approximately 1 1/3C, depending on how the dough looks.
Of course, if you make changes on A (and maybe B), the scones would not be as "healthy." B is debatable depending on the current reputation of "healthy fats" a.k.a. butter vs. coconut oil: what's healthier? media hype. I call the current version "sugar-coated poison" because it is mostly healthy minus the heaping loads of sugar.
Also, the flax seed meal part can be substituted with oat flour (tried and works), almond meal (haven't tried, but should work), or any other non-gluten filler material. This works because the whole wheat bread flour contains just enough gluten to hold up the scones, but not enough to make it bread-like. That is why if you remove the flax seed meal, you should use all purpose flour instead. The texture would be all wrong if you use all bread flour.
As for the coconut oil, I notice that it doesn't soften like butter when touched, but rather have a sharper phase change point. You may need to work a little harder to break the coconut oil into pieces during the kneading fat process (step 5). I haven't tried using all coconut oil on this, but in theory it should work. I think the pastry would be less flaky though.
If you happen to have buttermilk around, you can also use buttermilk in place of plain kefir. I just figured that you can drink the kefir/eat the Greek yogurt but can't drink the buttermilk so I make that change. My family would not drink kefir so I bought Greek yogurt and milk which I know would be consumed before expiration date.
Keep the dough somewhat chilled before you place everything in the oven would be a good practice as the fats would melt and the gas-forming reactions would be faster under warm temperature. Chilling the dough would slow the reaction somewhat and keep the fats from melting.
Hope you enjoy this recipe and happy new year! In case you wondered, the scones were a hit!
PS Thanks family and friends for being my guinea pigs! Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
