The Lightest, Fluffiest Scones Skip This Important Ingredient

A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. Psst—we don't count water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (specifically, 1/2 cup or less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we're guessing you have those covered. Today’s menu: foolproof cream scones, thanks to an unexpected missing ingredient.

A good scone is hard to find. It should have a confident crust and fluffy center, be moist (yes, I said moist), and extremely buttery. So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a raved-about recipe that included no butter at all.

Could it be?

The standard scone-making approach is the same as with biscuits: Stir together dry ingredients (flour, a little sugar and salt, plus any leaveners—baking powder, baking soda, or both). Cut in cold butter with your fingertips, a pastry blender, or a food processor. Then stir in your liquid of choice; cream and buttermilk are the popular picks.

But a couple months ago, I was re-reading A Boat, a Whale & a Walrus by Renee Erickson, and the Boat Street Scones’ ingredient list caught my eye: flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, kosher salt, dried currants, lemon zest, heavy cream, and demerara sugar. Where was the butter?

In the headnote, Erickson writes about how she learned the recipe from the since-closed Boat Street Café, and how it’s become her go-to: “I always have excess cream in my refrigerator, so on a Sunday morning when I wake up hungry, [these scones are] my go-to when I know friends might stop by.”

Because there’s no butter in the recipe, there’s no butter-incorporating. And because there’s no butter-incorporating, there’s no fuss. Just dump dry ingredients in a bowl, mix in cream, pat dough into a circle, cut into triangles, and bake.

Turns out, there are other butterless lookalikes out there. One day, the Food52 team was sampling some scone recipe tests and Director of Partner Content Cory Baldwin remarked that she makes biscuits in a similar way.

Specifically, the cream biscuits on Smitten Kitchen. Blogger Deb Perelman adapted the recipe from James Beard’s American Cookery, originally published in 1980.

“That's been my go-to biscuit since 2009, when the recipe was posted, and it’s never failed me,” Cory told me. “It’s so hard to mess up.”

Indeed, the risk with cutting butter into flour—for scones, biscuits, and even pie dough—is overworking the butter, and ending up with a dense result. Skipping the butter and increasing the cream takes away all the guesswork.

Which is exactly why our contributor Alice Medrich skips the butter in her easy-as-ever shortcakes: "no butter to cut in and no worrisome biscuit-making technique to deter you!"

Another person on the Food52 team who loves this method? Our cofounder Merrill Stubbs. She posted a recipe for cream biscuits in 2010—and, how about this, it was adapted from Marion Cunningham, who adapted it from James Beard.

The cream, Merrill writes in the recipe, “keeps them from being even remotely dry. And more great news for non-bakers like me: the recipe is completely forgiving.”

This recipe for cream scones is, too. Like the versions listed above, it has no butter and a lot of heavy cream. But from there, I made a few Big Little tweaks:

Instead of all-purpose flour, I swapped in white whole-wheat. If you’ve never worked with this ingredient before—it’s just like regular whole-wheat, but milled from white wheat flour instead, which means a lighter color and subtler flavor. I love how it makes the scones heartier, with a toasty, nutty flavor.

I also call for raw sugar instead of granulated. Like the whole-wheat, this means deeper flavor—in this case, caramely, molasses-y vibes. It also means a crunchier, crustier crust.

You could, of course, serve these with jam and butter. But my favorite is clotted cream or crème fraîche—more cream, because why not?

What’s your favorite way to make scones? Tell us in the comments!