Shortcrust pastry recipe: biscuits made from velvety crumbs


How do you bake good cookies? There are plenty of recipes, including some daring ones. But sometimes the proportions of the ingredients are not right, sometimes the recommended procedure is a bit strange or even contradicting.

A scientific mind would first ask when cookies are good at all. You want a crumbly, crumbly consistency, but above all a lot of taste, based on classic ingredients such as flour, eggs, butter and sugar … Not to forget the pinch of salt, which releases fragrances and at the same time enhances the taste.

Let’s focus on consistency first. As early as 1759, the Strasbourg chemist Johannes Kesselmeyer carried out an experiment in which he made a ball of dough out of flour and water and then “washed it out”, that is, kneaded it in water. From this one could conclude that flour consists of starch and gluten (a mix of different proteins). The latter substance is the reason why the dough sticks together: the water forms bridges between the proteins, creating a three-dimensional network in which the starch grains are trapped. Such a substance, however, is terribly hard – very different from the crumbly shortcrust pastry we want to make.

The toasted flour has a taste that comes close to that of chocolate

The addition of sugar helps loosen the network. If you add powdered sugar to such a ball of flour and water, the dough loses its consistency in a few seconds and begins to melt. The sugar draws the water out of the protein bridges, and a syrup is created in which the starch granules are enclosed. If you want to reduce the gluten contribution, this can be easily achieved by roasting the flour in advance, for example under the grill in the oven or in a saucepan without adding fat. You get delicious, toasted flour that has been stripped of some of its proteins and thus forms a perfect, crumbly consistency with the other ingredients. In addition, the toasted flour has a taste that comes close to that of chocolate.



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