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Want tender, buttery scones without yeast or waiting around? These bake fast and taste bakery fresh. I'm Gemma Stafford, a professional chef with over 20 years experience and I'm going to show you how you can make the perfect, authentic Irish scone at home. We'll rub cold water into flour, mix a quick dough, shape rustic wedges and bake them until golden and fluffy. So let's get baking. Scones are made and enjoyed around Ireland every single day because they are so simple. It is a quick bread which is no waiting, no kneading.
We're going to mix it all together and go. So in my bowl here I've got some all purpose flour. In Ireland we call this plain flour, just plain regular white flour, not self raising flour. Into this we're going to add in a little bit of sugar for sweetness, baking powder and baking soda are our raising agents. And these are what are going to react with our liquid to give us that really lovely fluffy rise. Here we have some salt, just to bring out the flavor of our other ingredients. So here's a nice little ingredient I decided to add in.
You can have it optional but a little bit of orange zest really makes these scones so delicious and tasty. Just a little hint of citrus in there. If you don't like it you can leave it out. Also if you want to add raisins into this or currants you totally can. I'm going to give those a little mix together just to get those raising agents mixed up. A nice big bowl really helps you get your hands into this dish. Now butter, let's talk about the hero here. I like to use bluegrass European style butter, high in fat, low in water.
Perfect flavor. I use salted for extra flavor. Have it nice and cold going into your bowl. You can rub it in with your fingers or you can use a pastry blender. I like to use a pastry blender sometimes even though I was bought up in Ireland doing all of this with your fingers it's just that the pastry blender means that you don't have to get your hands dirty. Your fingers don't warm up the butter, everything stays nice and cold. Also your skin naturally has oil. We don't want that to get into our dough and make our dough oily. So a pastry blender is a fantastic little kitchen tool that I use a
lot and it's very inexpensive. Filling that, use your fingers no problem. So the real secret to any scone recipe is cold butter and lumps like this. Very little handling and you have nice big lumps, small lumps and those lumps of butter when they hit a hot oven they will melt and they will create steam and that steam will rise your scone and make it really lovely and fluffy. You know in America I've had a lot of different scones and really nothing beats a traditional Irish scone and this is how you make them.
This should not be dense or heavy if they are they're made wrong. You want them the Irish way just like this. Now wet ingredients. So like I said these are soda bread scones. I do have other recipes for scones on BiggerBolderBaking.com because these are soda bread they require buttermilk. So this buttermilk is not only going to add flavor and moisture into our scones but the acid in the buttermilk is going to have a chemical reaction with the baking soda and that's what makes them rise. This is all science, very simple baking science.
We're going to whisk in an egg there to enrich the dough adding in even more fat. So if you want to make these scones and you don't have buttermilk in your fridge because you just need a small bit of buttermilk make my buttermilk substitute a little bit of milk and a little bit of acid, lemon juice or vinegar. It is so simple. I have so many great tips like that on my website where you can learn how to make your own homemade ingredients that make baking so much easier and fun. So there I have my liquid here I have my dry in we go everything in there. Now what we want to do is bring it together. I like to use a fork for some reason.
I'm just old school but it just gets around the bowl so easily. I don't want to touch it until I really have to hydrate all of that flour. Another important tip for successful schoolmaking is not over mixing. So I'm just going to turn this out onto my counter and bring it all together just with a few mixes. Just knead in those dry ingredients lightly bring it all together. Scones when they're a bit flaky like this and a little bit dry.
It means you're actually going to end up with really tender scones. So just gather up all those dry bits. Beautiful. Look at that. Come here to me Joey. See these big lumps of butter. This is what makes a good scone. So with your round dough put it onto your sheet pan lined with parchment paper. I see videos online people baking on pans with no parchment paper and it boggles my mind. I see it and I think oh god. Like they have to clean that baking pan.
Always line your pans unless specified. So I often get asked questions sometimes in interviews what are my go to kitchen tools. And something I use every single day is not something you would think is a baking tool but it is so important. A ruler. Pick yourself up a ruler at the dollar store the pound shop. I use it all the time because when you're doing your sheet pans when you're trying to figure out how high those are supposed to be. It's really important because you need to get the same measurements in the recipe for your recipe to be successful. So for this disc you want to have it around an inch thick which is around seven inches in diameter.
Nice thick scones not thin scones. To yield lovely thick scones you do want to cut them a bit thicker so make sure you don't flatten your dough out too much. An inch is a good thickness. Now simply divide your scone into eight triangles. So down the middle and the middle again and each of those sides divided into eight scones. Now here's what I like to do. I like to kind of batch bake scones and to batch bake means and you often see it with bread. And rolls are a batch bake where you put them closely beside each other where once they bake they will rise into each other.
It just gives you a really lovely look. You want to space them out around an inch between each scone. No more than that. Lovely. So the nature of quick breads is that once you mix the liquid and the raising agents together you do have to work quickly to get them into the oven because a chemical reaction has already started on the countertop. So no lollygagging as we would say in Ireland or arson around and we are going to egg wash the tops of the scones to give a lovely shiny top. Now here's the funny thing about scones.
Just do the top. Make sure the egg wash doesn't dribble down the side because if it does it drags down the scone. Very funny story but in college we did a test to see what would happen if you did that. And anything that dripped down the side dragged down the scone and prevented it from rising really to its full extent. So just on the top like that. Just so you know in this raw state you can actually freeze these scones, take them out at a later date to froth them and bake them and they will be as good as new. I do that a lot and they're really good. For right now though I have no patience to wait for these so these are going to go into a lovely hot oven that's waiting for them.
Take your scones in a nice hot oven 375 degrees Fahrenheit, 190 degrees Celsius for roughly 30 minutes until they're a lovely golden brown on top. My timer went off, the scones are beautifully brown on top and my kitchen smells like a bakery so I know it's time to take them out. This is what a real Irish scone should be. A lovely golden brown crust on the outside and a fluffy middle. I always recommend eating scones when they're fresh out of the oven even while they're still warm. When I eat scones I go all out.
Butter, jam and even softly whipped cream on top. And of course always with a cup of Irish tea. If you're in the mood for more authentic Irish recipes then get comfy, I have so many for you to check out. I'll see you back here again really soon.
