Why are my biscuits dense and not fluffy?

The reason: The butter has not been incorporated evenly , leaving pockets of your cooked biscuits that are dry, dense, and filled with flour. But even if you properly mix your biscuits, if your butter pieces are too large or inconsistently sized they may not get distributed evenly throughout the dough.

Is buttermilk or heavy cream better for biscuits?

Heavy Cream . The heavy cream adds flavor to the biscuit by adding a little more fat and helps hydrate the dough. The extra fat in the heavy cream is helpful because buttermilk in stores is often “low-fat” buttermilk.

How do you make my biscuits rise higher?

Bake them close to each other . Biscuits are an exception to this rule: Placing them close to one another on your baking sheet actually helps them push each other up, as they impede each other from spreading outward and instead puff up skywards.

What is Antarctica's national dish?

Due to the lack of permanent inhabitants and the brutal environment, there are no generations of residents to pass dishes down to, meaning Antarctica has no national dish . While you may not see a single piece of fruit or veg, seafood is very popular, with shellfish being a particular favourite.

What is the best food to eat in Antarctica?

Pemmican. Pemmican is the number one food on Antarctic expeditions. ... Bannock. Another Antarctica traditional food to fight the bitter cold is Bannock, a bread of sorts that has wide international appeal. ... Hoosh. Hoosh is a mix of Pemmican with bread or biscuits – add a little water (or ice) to get it down. ... Chocolate.

What is a traditional meal in Antarctica?

Pemmican can be eaten as it is, on sledging biscuits or made into a stew after minimal cooking as hoosh. Lean dense meat, traditionally buffalo, reindeer (caribou) or deer.

How do you keep biscuits from getting dense?

A creamy, emulsified flour-fat mixture will yield tough, dense biscuits; taller biscuits are typically lighter and fluffier. One way round this is to place the dry ingredients and butter in the food processor and pulse about 20 times, or until the butter has been cut into pellet-sized pieces.

Why are my biscuits flat and chewy?

The Problem: The Butter Is Too Soft You should be able to indent it with a finger and your fingerprint should look like a clean divot. Room temperature butter is just the right consistency to incorporate air when it's creamed with sugar. These trapped air pockets result in risen, fluffy cookies.

Why are my biscuits always flat?

Whichever fat you choose to use in your biscuits you need to make sure your fat is very cold as opposed to room temperature butter or melted butter. The fat needs to stay cold so it stays solid in the biscuit dough, otherwise the fat melts becomes absorbed into the flour mixture resulting in biscuits that spread out.

How to make hard biscuits soft?

If you have stale biscuits, you can try to soften them by wrapping them in a damp paper towel and microwaving them for 10–15 seconds . If you don't have a microwave, you can wrap them in a damp paper towel and place them in a preheated oven set to 250°F (120°C) for 5–10 minutes.

Antarctic Sledging Biscuits Recipe (2024)

Cooking sledging biscuits with suggestions on variations, easy to make.
Food technology, cookery, science

Sledging biscuits recipe and context PowerPoint - click to open or download
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Alternate file types, open or download:.pdf.mp4

Sledging biscuits in Antarctica are one of the two foods that Antarctic exploration was built on, (the other ispemmican) they are still in use today, eaten by people who are working away from bases in Antarctica as a dietary staple.

They are derived from hardtack or ships biscuits. A simple, physically resilient, nutritious, long lasting, compact food stuff that is easy to make. It takes the place of bread as the standard carbohydrate source when away from base.

There are a surprising number or ways you can vary the recipe for this simple food, the recipe I used would be similar to that used by Captain Scott on his journey to the South Pole. I can't say it's exactly the same as I can't find a recipe for what he used, in fact recipes for basics such as sledging biscuits and pemmican were sometimes regarded as secrets known to the expedition physician and suppliers of the food only. It wasn't really so important exactly what the recipe was, more so that it was a secret which added to the aura of the expedition. Sledging biscuits were used along with pemmican and snow to make a filling and warming stew known as hoosh.

The Recipe (or rather,A recipe)

Dough ready to be cut

Pricking the biscuits, this keeps them flat as they cook

Sledging biscuit, butter and marmite

Sledging biscuit, butter and cheese

Sledging biscuit with butter

Ingredients

150g plain white flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
30g butter (not nearly-butter, not butter substitute)
50ml cold water

Rub the butter and flour together so that it forms a fine consistent crumb, add the baking soda and salt and mix well.
Add a little of the water and knead the mixture to a soft pliable dough, adding a little water at a time to get the right consistency, you may not need all of the water and while you can add more, you can't remove it.
Place the ball of dough on a lightly floured surface and roll it out to around 1cm or just under half an inch thick and cut into rectangles. I got 8 approx. 5cm x 7.5cm (2" x 3") biscuits from this amount.
Prick the surface of the biscuits lightly with a fork (this stops them ballooning up) and place on a baking tray, I put foil on mine first as I wasn't sure how non-stick or otherwise it would be.
Place in a pre-heated oven at 190°C. The assorted instructions I amalgamated to make these biscuits said for 15 mins and that they should be turning golden in colour. After 15 mins I thought they needed a bit more cooking, so gave them another 3 mins, then I gave them another 5, at each of these three points they looked almost identical, so it seems cooking time is not critical and 15-23 mins makes little difference! Just don't let them get too dark, they should be quite pale and remember I used white flour for these if comparing them to yours.
Take them out of the oven and let them cool.

There are two traditional ways to eat them, firstly as you would a cracker, with lots of butter(more than you're probably used to or are even comfortable with) and maybe marmite (or vegemite) or cheese, and secondly crumbled into a stew withpemmican and water and anything else you might have to flavour it (like melted snow) to makeHoosh.

I had mine with butter, butter + marmite, butter + cheese as well as making hoosh. The purpose of sledging biscuits is to top up with energy during and after a hard day in the field. Even today, people who travel and camp in Antarctica often come back having lost weight. The high fat of this recipe, especially with extra high fat toppings may be a bit of a surprise as we worry so much about what we eat (though eat more unhealthily than ever) but the energy is needed. If you are outdoors in the cold working hard every day and camping out, you really burn through the calories.

Out in the field those toppings I spread on the sledging biscuits would be considered very thin indeed, equal thickness of biscuit and butter/cheese would be more like it.

Authenticity and taste test

Well they looked authentic enough, though the baking soda made them rise a little, whereas I remember sledging biscuits I ate in Antarctica as being thinner and harder.

These that I made were better than I remember, probably as a result of being fresh and not already a year (or 5) old by the time I ate them. They were actually very nice considering the limited ingredients. Sledging biscuits have always been functional rather than consumed by choice. There is only one person I remember in Antarctica who claimed to really like them and would eat one with relish when they were around, though never sought them out when they weren't and no-one believed him anyway. In Antarctica sledging biscuits tend to come in small individually wrapped packs of 5 or so and work out quite expensive for what they are, they are reserved for use off base.

The true authentic experience for me came when I had butter and marmite on a biscuit and unexpectedly, especially as I was sitting out in my English country garden in August, was taken immediately back to sitting in a tent in Antarctica at the end of an exhausting day wrapped up snug in a sleeping bag, propped up on one elbow with the Tilley lamp glowing and hissing overhead and the Primus making another brew of tea for us.

Recipe variations

The fore runners of the sledging biscuit, ships biscuits or hardtack, had no butter, and so the first sledging biscuits were probably similar, simple flat biscuits of flour and salt, shaped with a little water and baked.

By the time Antarctic exploration began, extra fat was added for extra energy, and recipes started to vary.

Roald Amundsen for instance used whole meal flour and added oats to make his sledging biscuits much better nutritionally than Scott's, he also omitted baking soda which may actively reduce the levels of some vitamins in the other ingredients.

Skimmed milk powder was also sometimes added to increase the protein, vitamin and mineral levels.

Lesson plan suggestions

Such a simple recipe and important foodstuff for a particular circ*mstance lends itself to use in teaching especially as it is also so easy to make. It took me about 15 minutes from getting the stuff out of the cupboard to having the biscuits on the tray ready to go in the oven.

You could get different students to make different recipes and then do a taste-test comparison as an introduction, then look at the ingredients in more detail researching the full nutritional value of the different combinations, bearing in mind that when away from base for months on end, minerals and vitamins become more critical in all foods eaten as the variety is much less. Roald Amundsen took just 4 foodstuffs, sledging biscuits, pemmican, dried milk and chocolate when he went to the South Pole in 1911, a return journey that took over 3 months, they also eat some of the dogs they took too and had actually put on weight by the time they got back. Vitamins weren't known about at the time, the first one, vitamin A wasn't discovered until 1913 with others found over the next two decades.

Here's some suggestions of combinations you could put together. The biscuits must have some sort of flour and always have salt, there are 16 possible combinations in the table below. I'd suggest the recipe further up the page as it is, the same with wholemeal flour, and then the same with white or wholemeal flour and added oats as being the most palatable and authentic. The taste could be considered alongside the nutritional data.

These biscuits could be compared to hardtack made with just flour and salt, mixed with water and baked.

Each horizontal line is a possible alternative combination of ingredients.

Flour + Salt	Baking soda	Butter	Other
white (120g)	yes	yes	oats (30g)
white (120g)	yes	no	oats (30g)
white	yes	yes	no
white	yes	no	no
white (120g)	no	yes	oats (30g)
white (120g)	no	no	oats (30g)
white	no	yes	no
white	no	no	no
wholemeal (120g)	yes	yes	oats (30g)
wholemeal (120g)	yes	no	oats (30g)
wholemeal	yes	yes	no
wholemeal	yes	no	no
wholemeal (120g)	no	yes	oats (30g)
wholemeal (120g)	no	no	oats (30g)
wholemeal	no	yes	no
wholemeal	no	no	no