deflower: a lesson on rubbing and lamination

now i've got my short burst of therapeutic baking to fight the horrible things that have happened today. buttermilk biscuits, from the american book.
i've discovered a new way of rubbing in butter without two knives or a pastry blender. that is to literally rub the flour in by hand, of course with a bench scraper to help cut the butter to smaller pieces initially. once small enough, you can smear the butter with your fingertips and continue to coat it with more flour. work fast though, to avoid softening the butter. and it helps if the flour is also cold to start with.
instead of having softened butter blending with the flour, the rubbing mixing method mentioned above disperses the butter throughout the flour mixture in small discrete solid pieces. what this means is that when liquid is added to bind the dough, the butter remains solid and dispersed in the dough. this method makes use of the butter to leaven, as opposed to using air in the creaming method. in the oven, these pockets of butter melt and produce steam, which expands and causes the dough to rise, leaving empty spaces in the resulting pastry. these empty spaces are what gives the flakiness/crumbliness of pie and tart crusts and other pastries made with the rubbing mixing method.

this is why rubbing must always be done in a cool environment - to avoid softening the butter too much. humidity is also your enemy in rubbing mixing. to compensate for the lack of an ideal environment in my kitchen, i chill the flour first and reduce the time i use to cut the butter.

on a side note, if you want to achieve mealy and crumbly crusts when making pies, rub until the butter is very small in size. if you want flakier crusts, leave some butter pieces in the size of small peas.
i didn't take any photos, but after the dough was gathered, it was rolled, folded and re-rolled a few times. the american book calls this 'lamination'. lamination is the process used to increase flakiness to a pastry, though i didn't exactly feel that in this case the dough was being truly laminated.

real lamination is exemplified in puff pastry, which can take years to master. you start with a rolled out piece of dough, on top of which you lay a thin block of butter. you fold the entire thing in half or thirds, as you do with letters. then you roll out to the original thickness. turn it and fold again, and roll out again. and repeat, and repeat...

what this gives is a dough that is made up of layers upon layers of dough and butter. the same principle applies in the oven. the butter melts and causes the pastry to puff up. because of the way butter is now combined into the dough, it rises much higher - up to eight times the original height - than the dough made above, which puffs slightly but gives a crumbly/flaky pastry. look at the chicken pies from your favourite delis and observe how the pastry looks like thin layers of crust just separated by air spaces - that's your puff pastry. (by the way, puff pastry is not the one used in cream puffs or éclairs; those use something else called pâte à choux.)

nevertheless, with a dough made as above, you can still roll out, fold over and re-roll several times to increase the amount the dough can rise as it bakes.
i have chosen to go free-form for all my rolled doughs; instead of using shaped cutters, i cut into random pieces of about the same size. it eliminates the need to re-roll the dough scraps, which sacrifices tenderness. crisis averted, delectably. not only that, cutting free-form makes the buttermilk biscuits look more homely.

now i need to clean.