The regional table / Utah
Utah Scones with Honey Butter
Published October 24, 2026 · Utah
Utah's scone is a deep-fried bread with nothing whatever to do with the baked British object of the same name, and the state's newspapers have been printing both meanings side by side for a century.
Utah's newspaper archive, which answers a browser and not a script, has the fried kind in print earlier than I expected. "Fried scones" returns 176 pages and the oldest is the Salt Lake Tribune of 4 August 1929, page 66 — a household menu column whose scan interleaves with a fashion column beside it, so that navy blue and lamb stew run together, but "Fried Scones" is plainly there in a list of dishes for the day. By the Deseret News of 22 May 1948 the thing is familiar enough to be a joke in a children's story, where a character's one weakness is "fried scones, especially with lots of butter and blackberry jam" — butter, note, and jam, with honey nowhere in it yet. Honey arrives in the 1950s. The earliest page I could verify pairing the two is the Roosevelt Standard of 3 November 1955, reporting a Halloween party in the Uintah Basin at which "Refreshments were served in the form of witche's stew (hot chili), scones and honey butter. Fifteen were present." Four years later it is a commercial proposition: the Logan Herald Journal of 29 June 1959 advertises a daily lunch — "Menu changed daily ... Salad, Dessert, Scones and Honey Butter ... Served from 11:30 to 2:00 pm" — and runs it again through that summer. By 24 August 1977 a Deseret News classified has "The Sconecutter at 2[4]1 South Main St" wanting a cashier for three hours a day at $2.75 an hour, a shop in Salt Lake named for the thing. One caution about searching any of this: "scones" on its own in Utah papers is usually the baked British object, and the Logan Herald Journal of 5 June 1942 prints a recipe for "FRUIT TRIANGLES (about 13 scones)" made from two cups of sifted cake flour, which is a different food under the same word.
Fried wheat dough in this part of the country is not one tradition but at least two, and they should not be collapsed into each other. The Ute and the Navajo fry bread in the same region by the same method, and in this archive that record is in the tribe's own newspaper rather than in an outsider's account: "frybread" returns 180 pages and the earliest is the Ute Bulletin of 10 August 1972, reporting a summer programme for children at Fort Duchesne and Whiterocks that included swimming, "a melon bust, a treat of frybread in the mountains and a party at Whiterocks school". That is frybread as ordinary community food, named by the community. Which of the two fried breads in Utah is older, and whether either borrowed from the other, is not a question this newspaper archive can answer — the settler version is in print from 1929 and the tribal paper only enters the collection much later — and I am not going to invent a line of descent between them. What the federal government does supply is the other half of the dish: butter has been defined by statute since an act of 4 March 1923, now 21 U.S.C. 321a, as "made exclusively from milk or cream, or both, with or without common salt, and with or without additional coloring matter, and containing not less than 80 per centum by weight of milk fat". Nobody cooks for this site and no public-domain recipe for this exact pairing exists; the quantities below were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
A fried bread has about four minutes of crust. The same steam that blew the scone open is still inside it when it comes out of the pan, and it has to go somewhere. Left whole on a plate it condenses on the inside of the crust and the thing goes leathery; stacked, the ones underneath steam each other. So drain them standing on edge rather than flat, do not cover them, and tear each one open as it is served, which vents it and makes the pocket for the honey butter in one movement. This is a dish you hand over as it comes out of the fat, which is why it belongs to church halls, county fairs and drive-ins rather than to dinner parties.
It is a yeast bread that happens to be fried, so it needs gluten and a rise. Everything about the name misleads here. A British scone is a chemically leavened short dough handled as little as possible; a Utah scone is a slack yeasted bread dough, kneaded properly, risen once, and cooked in fat instead of an oven. That means plain strong bread flour rather than cake flour, a real knead to develop the gluten, and a full hour of rise — because the structure that traps the steam and lets the thing balloon is a gluten net, and a soda dough has none. The 1942 Logan recipe for "FRUIT TRIANGLES (about 13 scones)" out of sifted cake flour is a useful control: same word, no gluten, no rise, nothing that could puff in oil.
Honey butter is half fat and half sugar, and the law puts the floor under the fat. The statute of 1923 requires butter to carry "not less than 80 per centum by weight of milk fat", and USDA's measurement of salted butter comes in just over that at 81.1 grams per hundred. Honey, by the same source, is 82.1 grams of sugars and 17.1 grams of water. Whip them one to one by weight and you get a spread that is roughly 40 percent fat, 41 percent sugar and 17 percent water — which is why it holds a soft peak at room temperature and why it slumps to a syrup the moment it meets a hot scone, which is exactly what you want it to do. Butter and honey are also, by coincidence, almost the same thing by water content, and that is why the mixture does not split.
The puff is the dough's own water flashing to steam, which fixes both the thickness and the temperature. Stretch a piece to about a quarter of an inch and drop it into 375-degree fat and the water in the dough turns to steam faster than the crust can set, so the two surfaces separate and the middle goes hollow. Two things defeat it. Too thick and the steam has too much crumb to push through, so you get a bread roll with a fried skin. Too cool — below about 350 — and the crust sets slowly while the oil soaks in, so it browns without lifting and comes out heavy. Use a thermometer and let the oil recover between batches; this is the whole technique and there is nothing else to it.
Ingredient notes
The dough: three cups of plain strong bread flour, a sachet of dried yeast, a cup of warm milk, two tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and two tablespoons of softened butter. Milk rather than water gives a softer crumb and browns faster, which matters in a two-minute cook. Keep the dough on the slack side — tacky to the hand but not sticky — because a stiff dough fights the stretch and springs back thick. Many Utah households use shop-bought frozen bread dough thawed overnight and that is a perfectly honest shortcut; it is what the dish became.
The honey: a third of a cup, which is about the same weight as the butter. Any honey works and a strong dark one will dominate; a mild clover or alfalfa honey is the usual Utah choice and lets the butter through. Have it at room temperature so it folds in rather than seizing the butter, and if it has crystallised, warm the jar in water and let it cool again before whipping — honey added warm melts the butter and the mixture will never hold air.
The butter: half a cup, properly softened, and salted butter is the better choice because the honey needs something to push against. The statutory 80 percent milkfat minimum is worth knowing because the things that sit beside butter in the chiller are not butter: spreads and blends run well below it, carry more water, and whip into something that weeps as soon as it warms. If all you have is unsalted, add a good pinch of fine salt to the mixture.
The frying fat: about two inches of a neutral oil with a high smoke point in a deep heavy pan — canola, peanut or sunflower — never filled more than a third of the way up. You need enough depth for the scone to float clear of the base, because a piece resting on hot metal scorches on one spot before it can lift. A thermometer is not optional here; the difference between 350 and 375 is the difference between a soaked scone and a hollow one.
Step by step
- Mix and knead a slack dough. Warm the milk to blood heat, stir in the yeast and the sugar and leave it five minutes until it foams. Add the flour, the salt and the softened butter and work it to a dough, then knead 8 to 10 minutes by hand until it is smooth and springs back slowly. It should be tacky to the hand. Cover and leave in a warm place for an hour, until roughly doubled.
- Divide and let the pieces relax. Knock the dough back gently and cut it into eight pieces. Roll each into a loose ball, set them on a floured tray, cover with a cloth and leave 15 minutes. This rest is what lets you stretch them thin without the dough snapping back, and skipping it is the usual reason home scones come out thick.
- Bring the oil to 375 degrees. Pour two inches of oil into a deep heavy pan, no more than a third full, and heat it to 375 degrees Fahrenheit on a thermometer. Set a rack or a tray of kitchen paper beside the pan, and have tongs ready. Do not start stretching dough until the oil is at temperature.
- Stretch each piece thin and fry it one or two at a time. Take a ball and pull it out between your hands into a rough round about a quarter of an inch thick — thinner at the centre than the edge, and never mind if it is not a circle. Lay it into the oil away from you. It should sizzle hard and start to lift within fifteen seconds. Give it about a minute a side, turning once with tongs, until it is deep gold and ballooned. Fry one or two at a time and let the oil come back to 375 between them.
- Whip the honey butter while the dough rests. Beat the softened butter alone for a minute until it is pale and light, then add the honey in two or three additions, beating between them, until it is a smooth, fluffy, pale caramel-coloured spread that holds a soft peak. It takes two or three minutes with an electric beater and five with a wooden spoon. Do not refrigerate it; it wants to be at spreading consistency when the scones come out.
- Drain on edge and serve torn open. Lift each scone out, hold it over the pan for a second, and stand it on edge against the side of the tray rather than laying it flat, so steam escapes from both faces. Serve within a few minutes, tearing or cutting each one open and putting the honey butter straight into the hot pocket, where it will melt halfway and stay whipped halfway. Do not cover the plate.
Flat, heavy and greasy means the oil was too cool — check it with a thermometer rather than by eye, and remember it drops thirty degrees the moment dough goes in. A scone that browned fast and stayed solid in the middle was rolled too thick or not rested long enough after dividing; give the balls a full fifteen minutes and stretch thinner at the centre. If the dough tears while you stretch it, it is either underkneaded or still tight, and in both cases another ten minutes under the cloth fixes it. Honey butter that has gone soupy had warm honey or over-soft butter put into it, and twenty minutes in the fridge followed by another minute of beating will usually bring it back; honey butter that looks curdled was whipped cold, and the answer is to let it come to room temperature and beat again. And a plate of scones that has gone leathery was stacked or covered — there is no undoing it, so fry in relays and hand them over as they come.
Storage and make-ahead
Scones do not keep in any useful sense. They are good for four or five minutes and edible for an hour, and nothing you do to them afterwards restores the hollow; a few minutes in a hot oven on a rack will crisp the outside of a day-old one but the inside stays tough. What does keep is the dough: made, risen and knocked back, it holds 2 days covered in the fridge and improves slightly in flavour, and divided balls can be frozen on a tray, bagged and thawed overnight in the fridge before stretching.
Honey butter keeps 2 weeks covered in the fridge and 3 months frozen, and it is worth making more than you need for the scones, because it is the better half of the dish and goes on cornbread, pancakes, baked squash and a hot roll. Take it out an hour before you want it and beat it briefly to bring the air back. If you are feeding a crowd, make the honey butter the day before, divide the dough in the morning, and fry to order in front of people — which is how every fair stand and church kitchen in Utah has always done it.
What to serve with it
In Utah these turn up in two completely different roles and both are right. As the savoury one, they go with chili or a thick stew and the honey butter still comes with them — the Roosevelt party of 1955 served "witche's stew (hot chili), scones and honey butter" in the same breath, which is a fair guide to how little separation anybody felt was necessary. As the sweet one, they are the dessert or the breakfast: honey butter, or jam, or cinnamon sugar, or in 1948 "lots of butter and blackberry jam".
To drink, cold milk is the honest answer and the historically likely one, with hot chocolate in winter and strong coffee or black tea for anyone who wants it. Nothing fizzy and nothing sweet, because the honey butter has that covered. If they are standing in for bread at a meal, a bowl of pinto beans or a pot of chili verde beside them makes the whole thing a supper.
From the recipe box / Utah
Utah Scones with Honey Butter
Slack yeast dough stretched thin and deep-fried until it balloons, torn open hot and spread with whipped honey butter — the Utah scone, which is not a scone, printed in Salt Lake newspapers as "fried scones" from 1929 and paired with honey butter in print from 1955.
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Total
- 1 hr 35 min
- Serves
- 8
- Calories
- 385 per serving
Instructions
- Foam the yeast and sugar in the warm milk for 5 minutes, then work in the flour, salt and softened butter and knead 8 to 10 minutes to a tacky dough.
- Cover and rise in a warm place about 1 hour until doubled, then knock back and divide into 8 balls; rest them under a cloth 15 minutes.
- Heat 2 inches of oil in a deep pan, no more than a third full, to 375 °F.
- Stretch each ball to a rough round a quarter-inch thick and fry one or two at a time, about 1 minute a side, until deep gold and ballooned; let the oil recover between batches.
- Beat the softened butter pale, then whip in the honey in two or three additions until light and holding a soft peak.
- Stand the scones on edge to drain, uncovered, and serve within minutes, torn open with honey butter put into the hot pocket.
Nutrition
| Fat | 20 g (7 g saturated) |
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| Sodium | 350 mg |
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| Protein | 6 g |
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| Serving | one scone with 1 tablespoon honey butter |
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| Calories | 385 |
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| Cholesterol | 20 mg |
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| Carbohydrates | 46 g (12 g sugar, 1 g fiber) |
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Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as
a courtesy, not as dietary advice.
Questions readers ask
Can I use frozen bread dough?
Yes, and a great many Utah kitchens do; it is arguably the authentic modern method. Thaw a one-pound loaf's worth overnight in the fridge, divide it into eight, rest the pieces under a cloth for twenty minutes to take the chill off and relax the gluten, then stretch and fry exactly as below. The result is slightly sweeter and softer than the dough here because commercial bread dough carries more sugar. What will not work is anything chemically leavened — biscuit dough, scone dough, soda bread — because there is no gluten net to trap the steam and no puff.
Is this the same thing as frybread?
It is the same technique and it is not the same tradition, and the honest answer is that I cannot date one against the other. Ute and Navajo frybread and the Utah settler scone are both slack wheat dough cooked in deep fat, made in the same country, and often sold side by side at the same fairs. In Utah's digitised newspapers the settler version appears from 1929 and frybread not until the Ute Bulletin of 10 August 1972 — the tribe's own paper, reporting children at Fort Duchesne and Whiterocks given "a treat of frybread in the mountains" — but that gap is an artefact of what got digitised and when, not evidence about the foods. Frybread has its own history, bound up with rations and removal, and it belongs to the people whose history that is. Treat them as neighbours, not as versions of one another.
Why is a deep-fried bread called a scone?
Nobody I can cite explains it, but the Utah newspapers show the two meanings coexisting rather than one replacing the other. The fried kind is in the Salt Lake Tribune of 4 August 1929 as "Fried Scones" in a menu column, and the baked British kind is in the Logan Herald Journal of 5 June 1942 as "FRUIT TRIANGLES (about 13 scones)" made from sifted cake flour. Both words are doing work in the same state at the same time, and in Utah usage the unqualified word settled on the fried one, so that a Utah menu offering "scones" means the fried bread and a Utah recipe column might mean either. The qualifier "fried" drops away somewhere between the 1929 printing and the 1959 restaurant advertisement that simply says "Scones and Honey Butter".
What proportion of honey to butter, and can I make it ahead?
One to one by weight is the version here, which is half a cup of butter to a third of a cup of honey, and it gives a spread of roughly 40 percent fat to 41 percent sugar — soft at room temperature, melting on contact. Two parts butter to one of honey is firmer and more buttery and holds up better on a cold roll; equal parts by volume is much sweeter and runs. It is better made ahead: a day in the fridge lets the flavours settle, and it keeps two weeks refrigerated or three months frozen. Bring it back to room temperature and beat it for a minute before serving, or it will tear the scone instead of spreading on it.