h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You know the feeling: why on earth didn't I think of that before? Or perhaps: why didn't I find out about this before? In this case it's: why didn't I notice this when it was under my nose every day?

I've never had much success baking biscuits except for things like flapjacks, which to be honest aren't really biscuits in the McVities/Peek Freans/Huntley and Palmers sense, ie Digestives, Custard Creams, Hobnobs etc. Obviously you're not going to be able to make carbon copies of biscuits like that at home because those are made in molds and in industrial quantities. When you make a food product on a large scale it's often a whole lot easier (and you can get better results) than making it in your kitchen. I can confirm that with relation to confectionery.

Whenever I tried to make something like, for instance, a McVities Digestive, the small scale makes it difficult to get a good mix, and even though they might have been pretty good on the day of baking they always went soft by the following day, even though I put them in an airtight tin.

So there I was a few days ago, watching a River Cottage video about cakes, and it included a few recipes for biscuits, some say cookies, including one where you make the dough, roll it into a sausage and refrigerate it, and when you want some you simply cut a handful of circles off the end of the roll and bake them. Which I did and they're delicious and the following day they were just as good

Now, here's the rub. This is kind of the way we do our cookies at work - they make a huge batch of dough, portion it out onto a sheet pan with dishers http://www.webstaurantstore.com/vollrath-jacobs-pride-47144-20-yellow-disher/vollrath-jacobs-pride-47144-20-yellow-disher.jpg and put the sheet pan full of cookie dollops in the walk-in. Whenever there's an order for cookies they grab three of them and bake them. Same principle, different MO.

Now I can go back and watch Three Chips for Sister Marsha http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MYuXRaW0B0 and modify the River Cottage recipe to make thins, puffys and chewys

What an excellent discovery!

Same kind of principle as I use for making the pitta dough, or pizza dough, and just leaving it in the fridge for when I want fresh bread... Also a good time saver

My sister buys frozen bread dough, then she can use it for many things... including pizza crust.
The best of both worlds?

I use differnt bread doughs for differnt things... I do sometimes make up four or five ore more times pizza dough than I need, and freeze it in suitable sized 'lumps', after leaving out that which I'm using on the particular occasion, then I've got the frozen too (keeps about three months or so I seem to recall, but I may be wrong) Straight from the fridge dough I've made is quicker though, as it only has to warm to room temp... from the freezer I've actually got to think about it, before hand and get it out in time to both defrost and warm up, before making it into pizza etc (I'm useually not that organised enough to think ahead )

Says the man who wrote the Zen Baguette entry

Well, there's another instance of what kicked this thread off

I have a stand mixer that's really bigger than I need - it has a 7-quart bowl, and that's too big for making one loaf, but really good for making two. So what I've done in the past is make two loaves and freeze one, but when it comes out of the freezer it's never quite the same.

But if I froze half of the dough before it's baked instead of afterwards...

I'm such a muppet sometimes

Freezing the dough should work like that; I've only really done it for the pizza dough and the pitta dough.... It takes a Long* while for it to defrost; not only to make it not frozen, but it needs to warm up fully to room temp before you can continue working it, to shape etc., and put into loaf tins, or make into a pizza base etc

Sometimes one has the time and mental concentration for zen-baguettes, sometimes one just needs bread in a rush, for each season a bread, and for each bread its day