Recently I was watching a number of videos on YouTube by various Indian cooks for making jeera biscuits. On all of the ones that I watched except VahChef/Mrs Vahchef, the cooks were making a grievous mistake in making their batter. They would start out with the standard beating of fat/sugar and then addition of eggs and then other ingredients, get a great batter and then.....to my Horror..... they would dive into the batter with their hands and start kneading it like chapatti dough. I was flabbergasted. Doing this will ruin the hard work up to that point of aerating the batter and additionally it will melt the fat into the flour due to warmth of hands. NEVER knead cookie dough. It may seem like it is crumbly but many doughs will melt together in the oven. If you knead you will get a dry, hard cookie instead of a tender melt in mouth type. Keep your hands off of cookie dough....use only utensils. Only time to touch is when you are making balls of dough and do that quickly and put aside for baking.
