This post has been inspired by my friend Jill Smo at Yeah. Good Times. who wrote this awesome post about her gravy recipe. It truly does look like the best fucking gravy I ever had and I intend to try my hand at it. Who knows? Maybe this will start a trend with other bloggers and we can collaborate on a "Best Fucking Recipes" cook book.
I think everyone has a specific something that reminds them of Christmas like no other. Perhaps the smell of pine, the glitter of tinsel or the sense of a panic attack looming on the horizon. For me it's shortbread cookies.
My earliest memories of Christmas involve pilfering buttery little scraps of shortbread dough from the bowl, helping my mother poke the tines of a fork into the cookies and then my mother weeping over a plate of elaborately decorated, angel-shaped shortbreads, each of which were missing their heads because I thought no one would notice if I only took one bite.
Needless to say she was done with cookie decorating from that day on. Which is fine because shortbread needs no frills. It is best when it is simple.
When I was old enough to be a real help in the kitchen my mother painstakingly taught me the secrets of the shortbread: that beautiful buttery delight whose texture reminds me of walking in freshly fallen snow. If that doesn't make any sense to you then you haven't eaten my mother's shortbread. Because I can think of no better way to describe the experience of biting down on these tender, melt in your mouth treats.
Have I sufficiently impressed upon you the superiority of this delicious biscuit? Are your mouths watering yet in anticipation? Are you ready to make some fucking shortbread, or what? All right! Here's how to make...
The Best Fucking Shortbread Cookies You Ever Had
The first thing you should know is that there isn't really a secret recipe. In fact the recipe itself doesn't exactly matter. You can get a very decent recipe on the back of a box of Canada corn starch.
Why doesn't it matter? Because any standard recipe you are given is always going to require some tweaking. According to Wikipedia traditional shortbread is "one part white sugar, two parts butter and three parts flour". This is too much fucking sugar. Also, if you don't know what you're doing, three parts flour is likely too much flour. If you're looking for an already tweaked, fool proof and kitchen tested recipe, here's mine:
1/2 pound butter
*a scant 1/2 cup of icing/caster sugar*
1/2 cup corn starch/rice flour
2 - 2 1/2 cups flour
So, a little science: sugar + butter + heat = hard candy. Ever notice how the crispier cookies like ginger snaps and ginger bread have a shit-ton of sugar in them? It's the sugar that gives them that hardness and that is what we don't want.
I try to use as little sugar as I can possibly get away with by using this method: start with 1/3 cup of sugar. Cream it with the butter and then taste. Keep adding sugar by the tablespoon until the mixture is only just sweet. It's always somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cup. It's also important to use a superfine sugar because it will incorporate into the butter more easily preventing accidental over-sweetening.
When handling the butter it is important never to touch it with your hands (Ne touche pas!), which is something we learned from the French-Canadian side of our family. My mother used to slap our hands away from the dough when she caught us touching it, trying to steal a morsel. She explained that once butter melts it's never quite the same again. You've separated the water and milk fats and such and they won't interact properly with the other ingredients, resulting in a tough cookie.
So I use either an electric mixer or food processor to cream the butter and sugar. After that I mix the rest of the ingredients by hand. Mechanical mixers are too efficient at incorporating flour and too much flour also = a tough cookie.
Flour absorbs moisture differently depending on the humidity in the air which means that the amount of flour you need for your cookie might vary. Add a minimum of 2 cups and then add whatever extra flour is necessary to get a good consistency for rolling your dough. Shortbread dough is great for rolling and cutting into shapes.
But we're not going to do that.
Because doing that requires working the dough and touching it with your hands (Slap! Ne touche pas!) and the more you work a dough the more likely you are to develop gluten and that = a tough cookie.
Instead we're going to press that dough into a prepared square or round pan (depending on the shape you like your cookies to be) with a spatula. Then we are going to plunge our hands into a bowl of ice water for a couple of minutes. Then and only then, we will use our now ice-cold, corpse-like hands to make the dough firm and even (about 3/4" - 1" thick).
Take a floured butter knife and score the pan into bars or wedges (depending on the shape of your pan), and then poke the floured tines of a fork about 1/4 of the way into the dough. Let the dough rest in the refrigerator while the oven preheats to about 300 degrees.
Shortbread cookies are baked for a long time at a low temperature because you want them to be almost white when they come out so they kind of look like snow, too. Delicious, buttery snow (aghaghagh...drooling). They'll probably need about 30 minutes but it's a good idea to start checking them after the 20-minute mark. They're ready when they are just starting to turn golden at the edges.
Take them out and let them cool.
In fact let them get very cold.
These cookies are delicious any time but I prefer to eat them after they have spent some time in the fridge. It just seems to add to that snowy texture I was talking about.
As long as you remember the rules about sugar, butter and flour you can try many variations on this recipe with good results. One year my mother and I experimented with four different recipes for shortbread. We discovered she prefers to use rice flour for its slightly crispier texture instead of the corn starch I like to use.
You can add a little vanilla or ground up nuts or you can dip the final product in chocolate but for me I like my shortbread just plain and simple.
With a big ole glass of Bailey's, of course.
I think everyone has a specific something that reminds them of Christmas like no other. Perhaps the smell of pine, the glitter of tinsel or the sense of a panic attack looming on the horizon. For me it's shortbread cookies.
My earliest memories of Christmas involve pilfering buttery little scraps of shortbread dough from the bowl, helping my mother poke the tines of a fork into the cookies and then my mother weeping over a plate of elaborately decorated, angel-shaped shortbreads, each of which were missing their heads because I thought no one would notice if I only took one bite.
Needless to say she was done with cookie decorating from that day on. Which is fine because shortbread needs no frills. It is best when it is simple.
When I was old enough to be a real help in the kitchen my mother painstakingly taught me the secrets of the shortbread: that beautiful buttery delight whose texture reminds me of walking in freshly fallen snow. If that doesn't make any sense to you then you haven't eaten my mother's shortbread. Because I can think of no better way to describe the experience of biting down on these tender, melt in your mouth treats.
Have I sufficiently impressed upon you the superiority of this delicious biscuit? Are your mouths watering yet in anticipation? Are you ready to make some fucking shortbread, or what? All right! Here's how to make...
The Best Fucking Shortbread Cookies You Ever Had
Why doesn't it matter? Because any standard recipe you are given is always going to require some tweaking. According to Wikipedia traditional shortbread is "one part white sugar, two parts butter and three parts flour". This is too much fucking sugar. Also, if you don't know what you're doing, three parts flour is likely too much flour. If you're looking for an already tweaked, fool proof and kitchen tested recipe, here's mine:
1/2 pound butter
*a scant 1/2 cup of icing/caster sugar*
1/2 cup corn starch/rice flour
2 - 2 1/2 cups flour
So, a little science: sugar + butter + heat = hard candy. Ever notice how the crispier cookies like ginger snaps and ginger bread have a shit-ton of sugar in them? It's the sugar that gives them that hardness and that is what we don't want.
I try to use as little sugar as I can possibly get away with by using this method: start with 1/3 cup of sugar. Cream it with the butter and then taste. Keep adding sugar by the tablespoon until the mixture is only just sweet. It's always somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cup. It's also important to use a superfine sugar because it will incorporate into the butter more easily preventing accidental over-sweetening.
When handling the butter it is important never to touch it with your hands (Ne touche pas!), which is something we learned from the French-Canadian side of our family. My mother used to slap our hands away from the dough when she caught us touching it, trying to steal a morsel. She explained that once butter melts it's never quite the same again. You've separated the water and milk fats and such and they won't interact properly with the other ingredients, resulting in a tough cookie.
So I use either an electric mixer or food processor to cream the butter and sugar. After that I mix the rest of the ingredients by hand. Mechanical mixers are too efficient at incorporating flour and too much flour also = a tough cookie.
Flour absorbs moisture differently depending on the humidity in the air which means that the amount of flour you need for your cookie might vary. Add a minimum of 2 cups and then add whatever extra flour is necessary to get a good consistency for rolling your dough. Shortbread dough is great for rolling and cutting into shapes.
But we're not going to do that.
Because doing that requires working the dough and touching it with your hands (Slap! Ne touche pas!) and the more you work a dough the more likely you are to develop gluten and that = a tough cookie.
Instead we're going to press that dough into a prepared square or round pan (depending on the shape you like your cookies to be) with a spatula. Then we are going to plunge our hands into a bowl of ice water for a couple of minutes. Then and only then, we will use our now ice-cold, corpse-like hands to make the dough firm and even (about 3/4" - 1" thick).
Take a floured butter knife and score the pan into bars or wedges (depending on the shape of your pan), and then poke the floured tines of a fork about 1/4 of the way into the dough. Let the dough rest in the refrigerator while the oven preheats to about 300 degrees.
Shortbread cookies are baked for a long time at a low temperature because you want them to be almost white when they come out so they kind of look like snow, too. Delicious, buttery snow (aghaghagh...drooling). They'll probably need about 30 minutes but it's a good idea to start checking them after the 20-minute mark. They're ready when they are just starting to turn golden at the edges.
Take them out and let them cool.
In fact let them get very cold.
These cookies are delicious any time but I prefer to eat them after they have spent some time in the fridge. It just seems to add to that snowy texture I was talking about.
As long as you remember the rules about sugar, butter and flour you can try many variations on this recipe with good results. One year my mother and I experimented with four different recipes for shortbread. We discovered she prefers to use rice flour for its slightly crispier texture instead of the corn starch I like to use.
You can add a little vanilla or ground up nuts or you can dip the final product in chocolate but for me I like my shortbread just plain and simple.
With a big ole glass of Bailey's, of course.
Only you could make a friggin RECIPE an entertaining read. I find myself yearning to incorporate "ne touche pas!" into my daily life now.
ReplyDeleteI really learned a lot about how to handle the ingredients. What a great read. I can't wait to try it!
ReplyDeleteIn the oven now aaaarrggg
ReplyDelete