I love those little leftover scraps of dough. As a kid, I remember the beauty of the pie crust cookie, little buttery bits of dough, rolled in sugar and baked until they were crunchy and caramelized. Working in the pastry shop, I loved tasting scraps of cake, trimmed from the tops and sides before icing. Those bites of sweet goodness helped carry me through long shifts, and there was something about eating those cake scraps that just made me happy. Other times I happily savored the irregular nubs of cheese after grating the rest, at the risk of my knuckles, to fold into various doughs. Laurie Colwin wrote about how it was the cook’s prerogative to steal choice crackling bits from the roast while carving in the kitchen, and those are still the bites that taste best to me. In Maine, I would take all the scraps from rolling out the shortcake biscuits and pat them into one large, crunchy, sugar-studded biscuit to be enjoyed by one lucky cook at the end of the shift. There’s something wonderful about how we use up those small bits of dough, and as we generate large amounts of them testing recipes for our doughnut extravaganza, we’ve begun turning the scraps into various marbled doughs. These are close to my heart and somehow taste more delicious because we’ve given these scraps a new purpose and made them into something truly special. It’s recycling at the highest level because we’ve taken the best bits and made them even better.
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