This recipe came from my friend Richmond Tracy who was head baker at legendary Seattle Café Septième, now long departed.  The original location in Belltown was a tiny hole in the wall with three south-facing tables outside, where you could sit, back against the whitewashed wall, soaked in the morning sun and enjoy a big bowl of café crème with one of these biscuits hot out of the oven.

The trick to getting flaky biscuits is to use the best quality butter and make sure that it stays cold. Use butter straight out of the refrigerator and work quickly so that your hands don’t melt the butter.  In French, the act of rubbing together butter and flour is described by the verb sabler, from the word sable meaning sand.  When done right, your mix of butter and flour resembles sand.  You gotta love a language with SO many verbs to describe actions involved in cooking and eating.

This recipe yields a dense, chewy bread that is great toasted.  Since it is a heavy dough, plan on long, slow fermentation and consequently, long raising times.

This is a an easy recipe for making a sour bread starter using rye flour, which is bases on a recipe in the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon.  A total of seven days are required for the starter to be ready to use in a batch of bread.