All month I’ve been sharing the recipes + basic holistic wisdom that shape my modern Ayurvedic kitchen; we started with this kitchari – a simple bowl that prioritizes digestion, then we jumped to this indispensable blueprint that emphasizes the Six Flavors. Last week I shared this Hot Cocoa for Grownups + taught you about including herbs in your menus, and the importance of paying attention to body wisdom before you determine what to eat (and what potent herbs to pick.) And this week, we’ve got a new favorite Ginger Chocolate Chunk Scone recipe to dunk in that very adult hot chocolate.
“Really? Scones are a must-have recipe in your kitchen?” you may be asking.
YES. Absolutely. I am a pastry chef, after all. I don’t emphasize joy + pleasure in our lives just on hypothesis; having foods we love on the menu is CRITICAL to the thriving of our bodies, minds, and spirits. But there’s another reason that I wanted to share this specific recipe with you and that is that it’s a perfect way to emphasize the importance of SPICES which are absolutely a constant in my Ayurvedic kitchen. These flaky, tender, golden + ridiculously excellent scones aren’t just packed with crystal ginger and melty chocolate; they also include several critical spices that don’t just amp up the flavor but literally CHANGE the way our bodies process and assimilate these baked treats. In other words, a scone without spices is just a scone; not really beneficial for the body, and maybe delicious but also maybe not. A scone WITH spices becomes a powerhouse that fuels our day.
No. Short answer. They are not. Case in point, there’s a bakery near our house that does a landslide wholesale bakery production for most of the coffee shops in Boulder. You can recognize their scones from a block away; they’re flat, usually filled with out-of-season blueberries, not salty enough, not really golden, and a little bit sweet but also if you close your eyes you can’t really tell if you’re eating said scone, or a muffin, or maybe a piece of cardboard. On the few occasions that I’ve been tricked into eating one, I always leave feeling like I’m on a sugar high, with a stone in my belly. This hard-to-digest little nugget of refined flour and sugar does practically nothing for my body. While eating a scone should elicit joy, this sad one honestly robs me of it; its appearance will tell you that no one considered “amping” it up, my body doesn’t feel powered when I eat it, and let me tell you that the joy of eating a treat is all the more vibrant when the food you’re indulging in actually DOES boost your vibe!
At the risk of boring the pants off of you, it feels worthwhile to call out a scone, break it down, and share the viewpoint on food like this from an Ayurvedic perspective.
Scones are simple; made with butter, flour, cream or buttermilk, a bit of salt, a tiny bit of sugar, some mechanical leaven (baking soda or powder), and then whatever else you want to throw in there to give it a flavor; fruits or nuts or chocolate and what have you. With this ingredient list in mind, we can call out the qualities of the food we’re consuming; butter, flour, and cream are all cooling and heavy, making the scone predominantly cold and heavy. Wheat flour is pacifying to pitta, and vata, which means that it will reduce these doshas, but the heaviness of the food can lead to sluggish digestion. When a recipe has few, very simple ingredients the sourcing of these ingredients becomes all the more important. This is to say that we want to use the best butter, most nutritious flour, and cream or milk that we can find. This will add benefit to a food that is otherwise just a rock in the gut.
But, if we add spices, we change the scone game altogether.
Of course, we amp up the flavor when we add spices – yes. We add a dynamic element of an otherwise flat or simple recipe. But from the perspective of Ayurvedic medicine, we also change the bioenergetic benefits, the bioavailability, and the qualities of the recipe as well.
Spices warm the body stoke digestion, and boost absorption. By adding them to this scone recipe, we make an otherwise heavy and hard-to-digest food much easier to process, we increase our bodies’ ability to absorb the nourishment from beautiful whole grains, pungent ginger, and anti-inflammatory chocolate.
Using spices in our cooking repertoire has this effect on all of our foods; boosting, amplifying, and improving in ways that extend far beyond just the flavors.
Individual spices also have health benefits that extend beyond their flavors and properties. For example, in this recipe:
The bioenergetic benefits of these flavorful little powders far surpass the other ingredients in the recipe. Pretty impressive, right?
Are golden, flaky, full of flavor and towering with chunks of ginger and melty chocolate. I love to enjoy them while warm, dunked in a mug of hot cocoa, or smeared with ghee or even date-ganache. If you warm them gently in the toaster, or over a griddle, the chocolate chunks melt just perfectly and it all feels so decadent and smart, ya know?
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