Penstock Coffee Roasters

View Original

A Look Into Our Sourdough Blueberry Scone

Today we sat down with our head-of-kitchen, Erik, to talk about our most popular bakery treat — the Sourdough Blueberry Scone.

This special scone was the brainchild of us wanting to make full use of everything we are making in the kitchen. In this instance, our heart broke a little every time we had to discard scrap pieces of live starter dough for our sourdogh bread. So we asked ourselves, “What can we make with this?” It’s too liquidy for bread but… just right for scones?! Thus, the sourdough blueberry scone was born!

Let’s get into the anatomy of this Sourdough Blueberry Scone and what makes it so unique and scrumptious.

Second to using our delicious starter, the grains make get us really excited— and they alone would set these scones apart! We use River Valley Community Grain’s Warthog Winter Wheat berries. It’s a hard red winter wheat and is renowned for its exceptional taste and flavor. What’s more, they’re locally grown and harvested at Ruthie’s Farm right here in Marksboro, New Jersey.

What are wheat berries? They’re grains in their whole form that we ground in-house just before baking in order to preserve the freshness of these nutrient-dense grains. In other words, it’s whole-wheat flour maxed out for its benefits.

Take this fresh-ground whole wheat flour, mixed with King Arthur’s Sir Galahad flour and Bob’s Red Mill rolled oats, and truly minimal sugar (that would surprise most), it’s a solid combination of only the most premium flours that create a great foundation for this scone.

Then we fold together cold Cabot butter from Vermont, eggs from Esbenshade Farms, Pennsylvania, half-and-half from Clover Farms, Pennsylvania and of course our very own house starter dough.

Much of the liquid portion of our scones comes from that starter. Many bakeries toss the “scrap” starter, but we couldn’t find the heart to do that because of the high-quality ingredients we use. It makes us want to encourage other people to look into their kitchen and make something creative out of what they thought would be scrap.

Left: “Mother” of the starter dough. Right: Delicious “Scrap”!

Finally, we throw in lots of New Jersey fresh blueberries - no skimping here! Carefully hand-mixed, every scone might look a little different but made with a lot of love.

The dough is par-frozen for precisely 2 hours, sprinkled with organic, fair-trade turbinado sugar for a touch of sweetness, then cut. Once cut, we bake them in small batches are baking them fresh everyday for you. The labor and love is worth it. And we’re happy that the folks we serve them to can feel good about them too.

Available daily until sold out, you can order one today with a lovely cup of coffee - we do that too!