Nothing beats a good cheese scone, fresh from the oven, or at least carrying that residual heat, it’s a soft fluffy wonder that just begs for lashings of butter to melt across the surface. Scones that have gone cold, but still fresh, and reheated are a dry crumbling mess that no amount of lubrication can fix that chalky horridness in your mouth. Give me a cold scone any day over a reheated one I say.
But why is reheated so naff? Well it’s all in the starch, as the hydrated starch molecule is heated it swells, dissolves and gelatinization takes place, which also makes the starch digestible. When warm the starch is a soft malleable fluid gel, and as it cools the gel becomes rigid and retrogrades back to a crystalline structure, which is not thermoreversible, meaning that heating will not turn the rigid crystalline like gel back into a smooth fluid gel.
So that’s why fresh warm scones are soft, moist and giving, but left to cool become drier to the mouth and more brittle and crumbly, reheating is never going to give you back that lush scone, it’s just going to give you a warm dry scone, probably drier as you’ve evaporated off water in the reheating process.
Originally posted on my Tumblr X-posts from Good Food in a Crap Kitchen
