Homemade Digestive Biscuits

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •Mixing bowl
• •Rolling pin
• •6cm round cutter or a small glass
• •Two baking trays
• •Baking parchment
• •Wire cooling rack

Instructions

1. 1

   Mix the dry ingredients

   Tip the wholemeal flour, oatmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Stir them through with your hand. The oatmeal should feel coarse against your fingers, the sugar slightly damp and clumpy. This is a biscuit that wants to taste of grain, so use the best wholemeal you can find. The cheaper stuff tastes of nothing in particular.

   If you can only find pinhead or porridge oats, give them a brief whizz in a food processor until they look like coarse sand. You're after texture, not powder.
2. 2

   Rub in the butter

   Add the cold butter to the bowl and rub it into the dry ingredients with your fingertips. Lift the mixture up as you go to keep it cool and aerated. Stop when it looks like rough, sandy crumbs with a few buttery flecks still visible. Don't overwork it. A bit of unevenness is what gives these their craggy character.

   Cold hands help. Run your fingers under the cold tap and dry them properly before you start. Warm hands melt butter, and melted butter at this stage gives you a denser biscuit.
3. 3

   Bring it together

   Add three tablespoons of milk and stir with a butter knife. The dough should start to clump. If it still looks dry and refuses to come together, add the last tablespoon. You want a firm, slightly rough dough that just holds itself in one piece when you press it. Wholemeal dough is never silky. Don't try to make it so.

4. 4

   Chill the dough

   Press the dough into a flat disc, wrap it, and put it in the fridge for thirty minutes. This isn't optional. The oatmeal needs time to drink up the milk, and the butter needs to firm up again before you roll. Use the time to put the kettle on. While you're at it, heat the oven to 170C/150C fan and line two baking trays with parchment.

5. 5

   Roll and cut

   Dust the work surface with a little plain flour. Roll the dough out to about half a centimetre thick. Not paper-thin, not chunky. About the thickness of a pound coin. Cut into rounds with a 6cm cutter, or the rim of a small glass if you don't have one, and lay them on the trays. Gather the offcuts, press them gently back together, and roll again. The second batch will be a touch craggier than the first. They'll still be lovely.

   Prick each round a few times with a fork. Tradition, mostly, but it also stops them puffing up unevenly in the oven.
6. 6

   Bake until golden

   Bake for sixteen to eighteen minutes, swapping the trays halfway through if your oven runs hotter on one side. They're done when the edges have gone a deep golden brown and the tops look dry and set. Trust your nose. When the kitchen smells of toasted oats and warm butter, they're nearly there. They'll firm up properly as they cool, so resist the urge to leave them in until they're rock hard. A slightly underbaked digestive becomes a perfect one ten minutes later.

   Let them sit on the tray for five minutes before moving them to a wire rack. Straight from the oven they're fragile. After five minutes they're sturdy enough to lift without breaking.

Chef Tips

• •The oatmeal is what makes a digestive taste like a digestive. Medium oatmeal is what you want, the sort sold for porridge in Scotland and for biscuits everywhere else. If you can only find rolled oats, pulse them briefly in a processor until they look like coarse, sandy grains. Don't reduce them to dust.
• •Muscovado sugar matters more than you'd think. It brings a faint toffee depth that white sugar can't manage. If you only have caster, the biscuits will still be good, just a touch flatter in flavour. A teaspoon of black treacle stirred into the milk helps if you want to fake the depth.
• •These keep beautifully in a tin for a week, though they rarely last that long. Layer them with a sheet of baking parchment between if you're stacking, and keep the lid properly shut. A digestive that has gone soft is a sad thing, but a quick five minutes in a warm oven brings them back.
• •Try one with a wedge of properly mature cheddar and a sliver of crisp apple. The sweet, nutty biscuit against the sharp cheese is one of the more useful things this kitchen has taught me.

Advance Preparation

• •The dough can be made a day ahead and kept wrapped in the fridge. Let it sit at room temperature for ten minutes before rolling so it's workable.
• •Baked biscuits keep in an airtight tin for up to a week. They are at their best on the second and third day, once the oat flavour has had time to settle.
• •The unbaked rounds freeze well on a tray, then bagged up. Bake from frozen, adding two or three minutes to the time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 20g)