Bis-cutie Lab (Biscotti Lab)

You’re a Bis-cutie <3 (Biscotti Lab)

Biscotti are a traditional Italian cookie perfect for dunking in your coffee/tea or just shoveling into your mouth!

Here is how we made our Lemon Almond Butter Biscotti:

Materials:
-Baking Sheet
-Sturdy spoon or spatula for mixing
-large mixing bowl
-measuring cups and spoons
-parchment paper
-sharp knife for chopping
-serrated knife for slicing

Ingredients:
-1/2 cup roasted almonds, coarsely chopped
-1 large egg
-grated zest of one lemon
-1/2 cup sugar
-4 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
-1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled
-1/2 teaspoon baking powder
-1/4 teaspoon table salt
-1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract
-1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Here’s how we did it:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

2. Place the almonds on a baking sheet and toast them in the oven for 15 minutes until they are well browned and fragrant.

3. Remove them from the oven, but remember to leave your oven on! When the almonds are cool enough to handle, chop them into small pieces.

4. Combine the eggs, lemon zest, sugar, olive oil or butter, almond extract and vanilla in a bowl, and whisk together until a homogeneous mixtures forms.

5. In another bowl, combine together the chopped almonds, flour, baking powder, and salt. Slowly add the flour mixture to the egg mixture, stirring thoroughly with a spoon until the dough is stiff.

6. Scoop the dough out onto a parchment paper–lined baking sheet, and shape it into a log about 6-8 inches long, 1 inch high, and 3 inches wide. Like so:

The dough should be sticky, but not like mozzarella cheese,  and you should wet your hands slightly with water in order to work with the dough.

7. Bake for 14 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet and bake for 14 more minutes.

8. Remove from the oven and let the logs cool on the baking sheet for 12 to 15 minutes.

So Nice We Baked it Twice:

1. Reduce the oven temperature to 250°F.

2. Place the logs on your cutting board. Using a serrated knife, slice the logs into ½-inch-thick biscotti.

3. Put the biscotti on a parchment-lined baking sheet, spacing them ½-inch apart.

4. Bake for 7 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet and bake for 7 more minutes, or until the biscotti are slightly crisp on the exposed sides.

5. Transfer them to a wire rack and let them cool completely.

The Final Product:

This is a closeup picture of the biscotti made with olive oil:

This is a closeup picture of the biscotti made with butter:

1. Why is butter a solid at room temperature while olive oil is a liquid.
The fatty acids in butter contain 50% saturated fat and 50% unsaturated fat and only 1-5% of the fat is unsaturated trans fat. The saturated fat and the unsaturated fats are more “stackable” and have more Van Der Waal interactions, thus the molecules are closer together. The fatty acids in olive oil contain 85% cis unsaturated and polyunsaturated and 15% saturated. They are less “stackable,” thus they have less VDW interactions because they are folded over on themselves.

2. Remember that butter has 20% water – what will happen to that water in the hot oven? How might that impact the texture?
The water in the butter evaporates or interacts with the sugar molecules, this lessens the water content and creates a crispy, buttery cookie because all that remains from the butter is the fat.

3. When mixing the ingredients you added the flour mixture slowly to the fat/oil mixture. What effect does the fat/oil have on gluten formation in the dough? What about your biscotti supports your conclusion?
Fat/oil inhibits gluten formation, thus a closed-texture cookie is the result. We added flour to the wet mixture slowly, so the gluten could form with the water from the egg and the butter, as no other water was added. Our biscotti was dense and the inside did not “spring back,” this is because of a lesser amount of gluten formation, and there was no gluten to trap the gases, thus it did not “puff up.”

Here is our Biscotti Review video. The password is: biscuties

Here are some pictures of our biscotti smiles