Seasonal, savory and sweet: Apple Cheddar Scones

Chopped apple provides a sweet foil to the savory cheese and buttermilk in these crisp outside/airy inside scones. Recipe below.

A quick note: with this post, we have now been doing Blue Kitchen for 16 years. We’re as surprised as you are!

THESE SCONES WERE INSPIRED BY AUTUMN AND A READER’S COMMENT. The changing season has filled farmers markets and supermarkets with apples. Falling temperatures have put us in the mood to bake, which for me, often means scones. Which reminded me of a comment by Sherry when we posted lemon lavender scones here last spring. She said she tended to like savory scones, with herbs and cheese. We’d never done savory.

These apple cheddar scones actually straddle savory and sweet. While sharp cheddar cheese, butter and buttermilk (instead of cream) certainly deliver on the savory side, bits of chopped up apple offer plenty hits of sweetness. For the apple, there are many varieties favored for baking in pies and muffins, among them Honeycrisp and Granny Smith. Our favorite, though, is McIntosh apples. They’re delicious for baking and for eating whole, in case you buy more than you need. As a bonus, their flesh sometimes takes on a rosy pink hue, giving you nice touches of color in your scones as you bite into them.

For the cheese, you want sharp cheddar. And for us, that usually means Tillamook. The Tillamook County Creamery Association is a farmer-owned and operated dairy cooperative in Tillamook County, Oregon. The farmers founded the co-op in 1909 to ensure that the cheese they produced was of the absolute highest quality. We got to tour Tillamook’s cheesemaking facility several years ago and talk to their head cheesemaker about why their cheese is so good. You can read about it here. For this recipe, we used their extra sharp white cheddar. If you can find it, you’re in for a treat. Otherwise, use a quality sharp cheddar.

We’ve just come across a genius move for scone making. For the most part, making them is straightforward and easy. But the dough is ridiculously sticky, making it hard to cut into wedges that hold their shape and don’t affix themselves to your hands and every other surface. Popping the dough disk in the freezer for a little bit makes it easy to cut cleanly and handle the scones-in-progress. More details in the recipe.

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Apple Cheddar Scones

Chopped apple provides a sweet foil to the savory cheese and buttermilk in these crisp outside/airy inside scones.

Equipment

• silicone baking mat or parchment paper

Ingredients

• 6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) cold unsalted butter
• 2 cups all-purpose flour plus more for work surface
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 generous teaspoon fresh thyme leaves (optional—see Kitchen Notes)
• 2/3 cup cold buttermilk (see Kitchen Notes)
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup grated sharp or extra sharp cheddar, plus more for topping scones before baking
• 1 cup chopped apple, about 1 apple (see Kitchen Notes)

Instructions

• Cut butter into 1/2-inch cubes: halve the stick lengthwise, rotate it 90º and slice lengthwise again, then slice crosswise into 1/2-inch pieces. Place in a bowl and pop in the freezer while you prepare the dry ingredients (you want the butter to stay as cold as possible until you're actually baking the scones).
• Combine flour, sugar, baking soda and salt in a food processor. Pulse several times to thoroughly mix everything. Beat egg and buttermilk together in a bowl. Set aside.
• Core, peel and chop the apple into about 1/4-inch cubes. Set aside.
• Add cubed butter to dry ingredients in food processor and pulse until the mix resembles a coarse meal.
• Transfer flour mix to a mixing bowl and stir in the thyme. Work it with your hands to break up any remaining butter lumps. Add cheddar and egg/buttermilk mixture and stir to combine. If the dough happens to not be coming together, add a little more buttermilk a tablespoon at a time. But be cautious; the it can become quite sticky. Gently fold in the apple.
• With flour-dusted hands, transfer mix onto a lightly floured surface, preferably on a silicone baking mat. Working quickly, shape it into an 8-inch disk, about 1 inch thick, slightly mounded in the center. Again, it can be sticky; dust your hands with more flour or even sprinkle a little over the dough as needed.
• Don’t skip this step. Place the dough disk on its silicone baking mat on a hotel pan and pop it in the freezer for 20 to 30 minutes. This will make the notoriously sticky dough much easier to handle and cut into wedges. As in we didn't have to clean the knife once—it just made slice after slice effortlessly.
• Using a sharp knife, cut the now chilled and firm disk into 8 wedges.
• At this point, we highly recommend freezing the scones to bake later. This helps the end product stay more scone-shaped, not spreading out as the fresh dough can. Also, you can bake fewer scones at a time. There’s not suddenly two of you staring down eight scones. And if you wake up on a random Tuesday morning thinking a scone would start the day just right, you’re that much closer. Transfer the individual scones to a parchment- or silicone baking mat-lined hotel tray pan. Cover with waxed paper and freeze for at least two hours. Then store scones in zippered plastic bags; we do them in sets of two.
• Do not thaw scones to bake. Preheat oven to 400ºF and place scones on a lined baking sheet. Sprinkle a little grated cheddar on tops of scones. Bake until golden, 18 – 20 minutes, rotating sheet halfway through. Watch closely toward the end so they don’t brown too much.
• Transfer baked scones to a wire cooling rack and cool either slightly or completely, depending on your will power.
• You can also bake all or some of the scones right now. If you plan to do this, preheat the oven while the disk is still in the freezer and follow the baking instructions above, but check them at 16 minutes to be on the safe side.

Kitchen Notes

Thyme or thymeless? If you have fresh thyme on hand, it adds a subtle herbal note. But if you don’t have it, you can skip it or substitute a generous 1/2 teaspoon of dried thyme. No more than that, though—thyme can easily take over and make your scones taste like turkey stuffing.

Buttermilk. Most scone recipes call for cream, half & half, or milk. Buttermilk adds a nice slight tanginess to the savory flavor. If you don’t have it, feel free to use cream, half & half, or milk.

Apples to apples. Our favorite for baking is McIntosh apples. They’re delicious for baking and for eating whole, in case you buy more than you need. You can also use apples you prefer to bake with, such as Honeycrisp or Granny Smith. We got a generous cup of chopped apple out of one apple, but maybe buy two just in case one isn’t enough.

Liz’s Crockery Corner. Marion here. We found the lovely little plate above last summer on a road trip downstate—in Sandwich, Illinois, I think. This is a remarkably well preserved example of the flow blue spinach leaf pattern. It has a purity to it that is unusual in a piece this old. I'm not sure who the maker was—the back simply has some marks impressed into the clay, an F, a 7 and a cryptic pair of tiny triangles. It was likely made some time in the 1820s or 1830s in England, then imported to the US. You’ll see a few more comments about this popular antebellum pattern in the Liz's Crockery Corner in our Lemon Blondies post from last year.

Last night, I happened to run across an article by Barbara and David Kamerance of the Flow Blue International Collectors Club, "China at the crossroads: The American Civil War and its effect on ceramics," which greatly expanded my understanding of the international pottery trade. In the years before the Civil War, the Southern states blocked Congressional efforts to expand the nation's industrial base and support its workers. But once the South seceded (and many Southern legislators withdrew from Congress even while Buchanan was president), Congress embarked on a flurry of legislation: for instance, encouraging westward migration with the Homestead Act; reestablishing a federal banking system and stabilizing our currency with the National Banking Act; building the transcontinental railroad, with the Pacific Railway Act; and founding the land grant colleges, which became our great state universities, with the Land Grant Act.

One of the first acts of Congress in 1861, interestingly, was to pass the so-called Morrill Tariff, which aimed to encourage American industry and raise the wages of industrial workers. During Lincoln's presidency, two additional tariffs were passed to raise revenue for the nation at war. All these tariffs had the long-term effect of putting the brakes on imports of china. The Kamerances note that in 1860, 60 percent of the pottery used by Americans had been imported; by 1900 only 30 percent was imported. The steady expansion of American manufacturing and the long, slow decline of the English potteries, including the disappearance of lovely artisan patterns like this one, was on the way.