PT's - Paul's Extraordinary - All Natural Biscuits

Seven years ago I was struck by the thought that biscuits and cookies weren't tasty enough. I mean, they're nice, but if you want a real treat, something seriously good, biscuits weren't top of the list. Not my list anyway. Biscuits (cookies to our American friends) seemed to be like ice-cream pre-Häagen Dazs – nice but hardly wow. Most are not in the least indulgent and the ‘soft bake’ cookies are just sugary and disappointing as soon as they are cold.

So I started experimenting with the aim of making truly delicious gourmet biscuits. A biscuit full of rich, crumbly buttery loveliness.

There were three tricks to making them so good. One was the ingredients; money no object, I simply searched and found the best. The second was changing the fundamental proportions of a biscuit recipe to give extraordinary flavour. The third, a special way of mixing the dough to get the right amount of air into the dough.

The first thing I did was decide we'd have no dodgy ingredients. So no colours, no preservatives sprayed onto fruit, no flavourings, no hydrogenated oils, no margarine, no cheap chocolate, no powdered egg, and no little "chocolate chips". In fact the only thing that’s not natural that I use is good old fashioned baking powder.

I tested different chocolate because it's not as simple as just getting good chocolate – it needs to be chocolate that reacts well to being in a very hot oven. Plus, the chocolate I was looking for had to be super creamy – so that you get that wonderful contrast of crumble from the biscuit and creaminess from the chocolate. Then I found an unusual butter that has a more intense flavour that really carries through into the baked product. Fruit pieces that haven't being sprayed with preservatives were surprisingly difficult to find... whole macadamia nuts were much easier, as David in the bakery knows a macadamia farmer in South Africa.

After hundreds of bakings & tastings, I created six truly delicious recipes. All crumbly and buttery, rather than hard, crunchy industrial biscuits that we are all used to.

But I wanted to make sure they were really good. Not just good in my opinion. So I travelled all over and bought every single good biscuit I could find in the UK, Europe, America, Canada & Australasia. I then sat in coffee shops getting biscuit and cookie lovers to taste them to make sure mine really were the best. They were... everyone could really taste the difference.

After some celebration came the really tricky part. Making them in any kind of numbers. Making them by hand wasn't any use at all; it just wasn't possible to be gentle enough if you were making anything more than just a handful. But no biscuit machine was gentle enough either – plus the dough was too rich. The dough would stick to plungers, the pipes would get stuck with huge Macadamia nuts, the air bubbles would get squeezed out of the beautifully aerated dough. We tried for years (literally) adjusting the machines – but still, they couldn't do it. Those were the dark years. It was enormously frustrating. Ask my poor friends that had to endure my stories of bunged up pipes.

But there was no way I was changing my recipe. And there was no way I was giving up. So, in the end, I built my own machine – well, the truth is, I got some clever engineers to build a machine for me. After about a year, we had the first machine in the world that could cope with my dough. What's more, a machine that’s more gentle than making them by hand.

So here we are now ready to sell PT's gourmet packaged biscuits, at last.

They are on Virgin Atlantic Airline Upper Class and we are fast being approached by shops, so soon you’ll be able to buy them in a shop near you but till then you can also buy them on-line from this site.

I hope you like them. Let me know what you think. It’s amazing to get feedback from people, so if you have time, do drop me a line.

Happy eating, yours in biscuits