Prosciutto and Blue Cheese Scones
By: Saskia Sorrosa
Published: Friday, March 23, 2012 - 7:49am

Ingredients




~ 3 cups all-purpose flour
~ 2 tablespoons sugar
~ 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
~ 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
~ 1/4 + 1/8 teaspoon salt
~ 1 1/2 sticks (6 ounces) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
~ 1 cup buttermilk
~ 1/4 pound prosciutto di parma or san daniele, chopped
~ 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup good, crumbled blue cheese (or more to taste, depending on how cheesy you want it)
~ 1/2 stick (2 ounces) unsalted butter, melted, for brushing scones

Preparation

1 Preheat oven to 425 degrees. 2 In a medium bowl, stir the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together with a fork. Add the cold butter pieces and, using your fingertips, work the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles course cornmeal.  It’s OK if some large pieces of butter remain – they’ll add to the flakiness! 3 Add the blue cheese and prosciutto and mix with fork until just combined. Add the 1 cup buttermilk and mix with fork until the ingredients are just moistened – the dough will look rough. If you feel like the dough is dry, add more buttermilk one tablespoon at a time. 4 Gather the dough into a ball, pressing it gently so it holds together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead lightly – about 12 times. Cut the dough in half. Roll one piece of the dough out to a circle about 1/2″ – 3/4″ thick and about 7 inches in diameter. Brush the dough with a healthy helping of the melted butter and cut the dough with a pizza cutter or a sharp knife into as many triangles as you like. I like to cut the dough halfway vertically and halfway horizontally to make four large pieces. Then I cut one line diagonally on the left and another on the right.  That makes about 12 triangles. If you want your scones to be larger, cut less triangles. Place the scones on an ungreased baking sheet and set aside while you roll out the rest of the dough. Repeat steps. 5 Bake the scones for 12 – 15 minutes until the they are golden on the top and bottom. Transfer to a cooling rack and cool slightly. They are best served warm. If you’re not eating the scones the same day or the next, wrap them airtight and freeze. They’ll stay fresh for a month. To serve, defrost the scones at room temperature in their wrappers, then unwrap and reheat on a baking sheet for 5 minutes in a 350 degree oven. 6 One side note – if you’re thinking of adding more blue cheese, keep in mind the saltiness it adds to the scones. You may want to lower the amount of salt you add if you increase the quantity of blue cheese.

About

The foundation for this recipe is Julia Child’s Buttermilk Scone recipe from “Baking with Julia” from which I made a few adjustments to get to the recipe you’ll see below. These are finger licking good and I find that they stay fresh longer than your regular scones (which normally dry out by the next day). It might be the moistness of the blue cheese? Not sure what it is, but if you keep these in an air tight container, at room temperature, they’ll keep well and remain flaky for another day or so. I wouldn’t push it beyond that though, unless you freeze them.