Spring is here! For those of you out there who, like me, associate the change in weather with what fruits and veggies are in season, spring is a wonderful time for all things green and delicate.
Springtime in the food universe is best known for “young” vegetables such as squash blossoms, baby kale, and peas (just to name a few). This means the farmer’s market is a very exciting scene right around this time of year. I for one power walked through the masses with my tote bag and bee-lined for the vendor I knew would have the freshest squash blossoms. Low and behold, it wasn’t the squash blossoms I went home with, but the mulberries!
Mulberries might not seem like anything to get worked up over, and most people don’t even know what they look like. Me included until last week if I’m being honest. Their flavor is a lot more delicate than the tang of a blackberry, with some of the floral notes of a blueberry. Basically if a blueberry and a raspberry had a baby, it would be the mulberry. All you really need to know is that they taste amazing in scones.
Makes 9-12 scones depending on how you cut them.
Ingredients:
- 4 3/4 cups flour
- 1 cup + 1 tbsp cold butter (unsalted)
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
- 1 tbsp baking powder
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 cup mulberries (you can estimate this)
- 1 egg
- turbinado sugar (for dusting)
Kitchen Tools: baking sheet, parchment paper, colander, whisk, pastry brush, pastry blender (optional)
Prep Work:
Chunk up your butter into about 1/2″ cubes. Place in a bowl in the freezer. Lightly rinse your mulberries in a colander and carefully pay dry with paper towels. Remove mulberry stems and discard. Use scissors or a knife to cut mulberries into 1/2″ long sections.
Cooking:
Preheat your oven to 400*F. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt in a mixing bowl. Whisk until fully combined. Take out your butter and incorporate it into the dry ingredients using a pastry blender or by breaking up the cubes with your hands until the butter is in pea-sized chunks and evenly distributed through out the mixture. (If doing this by hand, give yourself a solid 10 minutes to complete this part).
Fold in mulberries and pour in the buttermilk. Stir with a wooden spoon until the dough sticks together when pressed between your hands but still looks a little dry. If dough doesn’t stick together, add buttermilk 1 tbsp at a time until it does.
Flour a work surface and dump out your dough onto it. Use your hands to shape the dough into about a 1″ thick rectangle. Slice down the middle on the short side twice to create three equal sized thinner rectangles. Cut each of these into three triangles.
Place parchment paper on baking sheet and set scones on parchment about 1-2 inches apart. Whisk egg in a small bowl and use a pastry brush to brush the tops of the scones. Sprinkle with turbinado sugar. Bake for 20-25 minutes until tops of scones are just starting to get light brown. Serve with jam and fresh butter.
Tips + Tricks:
- You can replace mulberries with any other berries that suit your fancy
- I really recommend a pastry blender to incorporate the butter. Using your hands sounds great in theory but it can seriously take forever.
- How you cut the scones is up to you. As long as they’re about an inch or so thick the shape is entirely up to you!
