What’s in a name? Sometimes, quite a lot! Take biscuits, for example.

To an American a biscuit is a scone like pastry made with buttermilk and is often served alongside savory dishes like stews. In the South biscuits and gravy are served for breakfast. Just as popular, biscuits are also eaten much like scones with butter, honey or jam.

To a Brit, however, a biscuit is a slightly sweet crispy treat somewhere between a cookie and a cracker you would enjoy with a nice cup of tea or coffee.

So, now that we are all clear on the differences, these Digestive Biscuits are the British style and they have become our new favorite snack.

Used to be, back in the bad old days in the UK everybody stopped mid morning and again mid afternoon for a nice cuppa. Usually tea but sometimes coffee. It was said that a good cup of tea could solve all the world’s problems and it was true. For that 15 minutes while you sit back and relax with your cup of tea, all the world’s problems go away. Of course, they came crashing back again as soon as the tea break was over. But at least twice a day you could be assured of a little peace and serenity.

Typically you would have a little snack with your cuppa in the form of a biscuit. One of my favorites was (and still is) a McVitie’s chocolate covered digestive.

Digestive biscuits were invented in 1839 by two doctors in Edinburgh, the epicenter of medical science at the time. They believed (somewhat erroneously) that the biscuits aided digestion because they contained bicarbonate of soda, hence the name ‘Digestive”. There is no science to support this notion but to this day, McVitie’s digestives remain the most popular biscuits sold in the UK.

Here in the US making cookies at home is very common. Making biscuits at home in the UK, not so much, I think. It is so much easier to buy a packet of biscuits at the store. I am an avid food label reader and it distresses me when I read on some labels the preservatives and unpronounceable ‘stuff’ in the product I am expected to eat. There are some exceptions to the label reading rule, however, and McVitie’s is one of them. I mean, everybody is entitled to some guilty pleasures, right? And it’s not like I eat them every day or anything…

I can get McVitie’s where I live here in California but they are hugely expensive compared to UK supermarket prices and are usually at or near their ‘best by’ date. And so I always fancied having a go at making digestives at home. I’ve tried a few recipes and have been thoroughly underwhelmed with the results. Until a few months ago when I happened upon an article in the Guardian newspaper by their food writer, Felicity Cloake. In the article Ms Cloake compared recipes from a number of bakers and created her own, a composite of the ones she compared. I made them and they weren’t half bad. (You can read the original article here). I made some modifications though. So many in fact that even though I used Ms Cloake’s recipe as a starting point I feel comfortable claiming this one as my own.

I call for white whole wheat flour here. While not as ubiquitous as the red whole wheat flour, it is widely available in the US. Wholemeal flour in the UK is made from white wheat berries by default because that is the wheat most commonly used there. White wheat berries are not actually white, more of a tan color. The flour is less bitter than that made from red wheat and has a milder, sweeter taste.

The oatmeal I use is proper Scottish oatmeal (what we Scots would call porridge oats), not the Quaker rolled oats. Rolled oats are oat berries that have been steamed to soften them, then rolled flat, hence the name! I have ground up some rolled oats to use instead of the porridge oats to see how the biscuits would turn out. (I use a cheap – $20 – coffee grinder for this purpose as well as for grinding fresh spices but you could just as well whizz the rolled oats in a food processor). There was a noticeable difference in taste but it still made pretty good biscuits so, if you can’t find proper porridge oats, ground up rolled oats will do. Irish steel cut oats won’t work here. Again as the name suggests, steel cut oats are oat berries that are cut into large pieces rather than being ground like porridge oats.

I originally developed this recipe around a stick of butter. Here in the US, butter is commonly sold in 1 pound (450g) packages with each package containing 4 x 4 ounce ‘sticks’. How many biscuits you get out of this batch of dough depends on how big they are and how thick you roll the dough. I got 18 biscuits if I roll the dough 3/16″ (5mm) thick and use a 2-3/4″ (7cm) cookie cutter. I found that 3/16″ is a good thickness; any more and the biscuits don’t crisp up like they should and any less they tend to get too brown around the edges. However, 18 biscuits didn’t last long so I upped everything by 33% and now make 24 at a time.

So that raises a question; how do you get the dough to an even, consistent thickness? You can buy these rubber band thingies you fit over the ends of your rolling pin. The bands come in various thicknesses so you can roll out any dough evenly to whatever thickness is appropriate. You can also buy a set of plastic sticks at a baking supply shop. They too come in various thicknesses. You set a stick on either side of the dough and roll it out until the rolling pin gets to that level for even thickness every time. A clever idea, I thought. But me, being me, decided, “I can make these”, and so I did! Carpentry is one of my many hobbies I went to my workshop and fashioned a set of limit sticks out of some maple wood I happened to have left from a previous project. They work perfectly. I would encourage you to look for the commercially available product or, if you have the wherewithal, make some. It will make your baking life a lot easier, trust me!

Do you see those holes I poked in the biscuits? They are not just for show. The holes allow moisture to evaporate during baking so that the biscuits bake and crisp evenly. Otherwise the edges would crisp up while the center would not. Being mildly OCD about these things I poked 14 holes in each biscuit with a bamboo skewer for a total of 336 holes. That was getting a bit tedious so I made a spring loaded stamp to streamline the process. But again, that’s just me all over, isn’t it? A normal person would poke the biscuits a few times with the tines of a fork!!

You will notice that there is very little liquid in the dough; only 4 teaspoons. So, what binds the dough together? The sugar! The little bit of milk dissolves the sugar which becomes liquid. It does make the dough quite sticky though and that is why I roll it on wax paper and covered with a sheet of plastic wrap. Even so, the dough will still tend to stick to the wax paper, especially in warmer weather. I use a small off-set spatula like this one to lift them off the paper.

Now, what about chocolate? Chocolate covered McVitie’s digestives are a very special treat with either dark or milk chocolate. If you want to melt some chocolate and spread it on one side of your digestives, by all means, go ahead. Personally I think the biscuits work perfectly well on their own.

These biscuits keep very well in an airtight container for several days without loosing their crispness. Of course they don’t usually last that long!

To make the biscuits you will want to:

Prepare to roil out the dough:

…bake the biscuits according to the recipe instructions.