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This article is part of a series about making bread. Get more like this along with free bread mixes, free recipes, and a chance to win a free bread machine. Learn more here!
It’s a fond snapshot in my mind: A table big enough to handle eight chairs in front of a south-facing window with bright curtains pulled back. It’s lined with big bowls of dough. The warmth of the sunshine keeps the dough rising. I remember that the kitchen smelled of yeast and hot oil.
Every few days my mother would make bread. With six kids, some teenage boys, she made prodigious amounts of bread. When it got puffy, she sliced slabs about an inch thick and dropped them into a pair of frying pans half filled with hot oil. (It took two frying pans to keep up with six kids.) She fried them until they were golden on each side.
My brothers and I would melt butter on the hot bread, pushing chunks across the surfaces with forks until the butter melted. We poured warm syrup over the buttery surfaces, syrup made with sugar and a maple flavoring–Mapleline I think—until there were pools of buttery syrup smothering the hot, fried bread.
We loved them. Mother called them scones.
Years later, married and with kids, we lived in Minnesota. It seemed like scones were everywhere, in every coffee shop and any restaurant that served breakfast, but they were different than mother made, more like biscuits, made with baking powder and baked into crusty wedges that were often frosted.
Then we moved to Idaho to start our business. I discovered scones again–like those my mother made—fried, yeasted bread dough. Even the better restaurants served them as you waited for your meal. They weren’t as big and rugged as my Mother’s, but the concept was the same. In Minnesota, they would have been called fried bread. In Idaho, they were fried scones.
I love both. We make a line of scone mixes at The Prepared Pantry. They are the Minnesota kind; flakey scones, some with nuts and some with white chocolate and raspberry chips. With frosting, they’re more like a pastry.
The Easy Way to Make Fried Scones
Those indulgent raised, glazed donuts are fried. All you need is bread dough.
The easy way to make bread dough is with a mix. Pick any bread mix—white or a light wheat works well. Assemble the mix per the instructions but set your bread machine on the dough cycle and make your bread dough.
If you don’t have a bread machine, use your stand-type mixer equipped with a dough hook. Add the mix, yeast from the yeast packet (some of our mixes have the yeast mixed in with the flour), water and oil and mix with the dough hook at a medium speed. The dough should form a soft ball and pull away from the sides of the bowl as it mixes. After three or four minutes, the dough should become very stretchy, elastic. Mix longer if needed to become elastic.
It’s the gluten in the dough that makes it elastic. It forms when the proteins in the flour are hydrated with water and mechanically worked.
You’re ready to make fried bread. Here are the steps.
- Mix the bread as instructed from your favorite recipe or mix and let the dough rise.
- Instead of forming loaves, roll or pat the dough on a counter until it is about 1/2-inch thick.
- Slice the dough into wedges, separate the pieces, cover, and let them rise again until twice as thick.
- Heat a pan of oil until hot and slip the dough pieces two or three at a time into the hot oil. When one side is browned, turn the dough over. If the oil is hot enough, the dough should absorb little oil.
- When done, drain the fried bread on paper towels.
How to Serve Your Fried Scones (and get free mixes)
You can serve these with lots of melted butter and your favorite jam or syrup just as you would pancakes or waffles. Our favorite by far is with Buttermilk Syrup. You can now get buttermilk syrup in a convenient mix and eight different flavors. Pick the flavors that your family will like best—like marshmallow or butter rum. The original is very much a caramel flavor, maybe with a butterscotch overtone.
Free! Get a bread mix for scones and a buttermilk syrup in a bundle for free with a coupon. Click here to get the coupon and get both mixes for free!
See the Fried Scone Kit with Syrup and Bread Mixes
About the Author
Dennis Weaver has burned food from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Miami, Florida. He is the founder of The Prepared Pantry in Rigby, Idaho and the author of How to Bake: The Art and Science of Baking available as an E-book or as a Kindle book on Amazon.
Dennis lives in Rigby, Idaho, with his wife, Merri Ann. They have five wonderful children and five beautiful granddaughters.