Flaky Tiers

I'll admit that my love of whole grains and selected fats have sometimes led me to create hard crust.  (I rarely follow a recipe to the tee).

I like this technique, called "laminating" which calls for folding and rolling chilled dough.  This is outlined in The Local Palate October issue.  I also watched a 'Biscuit Queen' on Public Broadcasting do the same technique.  

I used vegan buttery sticks for the fat.  These were cut in small squares and placed in the mixing bowl with the flour.  I chilled the bowl, then mixed slightly with the paddle blade before adding the liquid.  I did not overmix, rather just enough to press together a dough ball-placing it in saran wrap and refrigerating it again. 

The chilled dough bowl is rolled into a rectangle on a floured pastry cloth.  The rectangle is folded into thirds and rolled again.  At this point the dough can be wrapped and chilled again, repeating the folding and rolling again.

For biscuits, I cut the rolled dough into sizes that fit in a muffin tin, baked some and froze some dough rounds to be baked at a later time.  The thawed dough rounds bake in 10 minutes.  The frozen dough rounds bake in 20 minutes.

The Barley Biscuit recipe is from Martha Stewart.  I cut the added salt in half.  By cutting the dough in rounds, the servings yield was 12-14 ( 3 biscuits each) rather than the 9 (original recipe) cut in squares.

I simply love the whole grain puff pastry recipe from the Local Palate which details the laminating technique.  My tomato tart has a pesto base and toasted ground pepitas sprinkled on the pastry edges.

I still have some perfecting to do. . . but I'm liking the results I'm getting!