A few years ago, a cookie recipe went viral. It was getting so much press that I gave it a go. They were fine, but I told a friend, “It’s shortbread.” She replied, “Yes, but millennials have never had shortbread.”
So if you’re new to the wonders, and deliciousness, of shortbread — welcome!
There have been some innovations in shortbread, with people adding everything from rice flour to hard-cooked egg yolks. At the risk of sounding extra-cranky (in addition to railing about untoasted nuts in desserts and salads, above), I’m not necessarily on board with overthinking shortbread. But as the internet generation tells us, you do you. And I’m not here to lecture; I’m here for the shortbreads.
In France, shortbread cookies are called sablés, named after sand (sable) due to their sandy (sablé) texture. Sablés bretons are the best known of the lot. In France, butter comes in doux (unsalted), demi-sel (partially salted, containing between .5 and 3% salt), and sel (which has more than 3% salt). But in Brittany, salted butter (beurre salé) is the default butter.
(Some butters even contain crystals (cristaux) of crunchy salt, which are wonderful for breakfast on toast with a drizzle of dark, bitter buckwheat honey.)
In Brittany, butter was salted because people enjoyed it so much, that salt was added to preserve it before the advent of refrigeration. Nowadays, people like the flavor, and classic Breton desserts, like Kouign amann and gâteau Breton, rely on it for flavor, and rye bread with salted butter is obligatoire to eat with fresh oysters.
I’ve become a fan of using salted butter in desserts, which may be because I married into a family with une vrai mère bretonne, a very Breton mother, who always kept salted butter on hand, as I now do, too.
That said, in this recipe, which I developed in the 1990s for my first book, Room for Dessert, I used unsalted butter. (The book is now out of print, but the recipe appears in my newer book, Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes.) If you published a recipe with salted butter back then, in the U.S., all heck would break loose, since bakers (myself included) drilled it into people’s heads that we all should only bake with unsalted butter. If I’d had a Breton mother-in-law back in those days to set me straight, I maybe would have spread a different word back then!
One thing the French don’t have, though, is nostalgia for their robots pâtissiers, as Americans do with our KitchenAid mixers. My first kitchen in Paris was tiny, and a stand mixer would have taken up one-third of the entire kitchen, so I decided to go without.
Well…that lasted for about a year. Then I caved and got one. They’re expensive in Europe, but in the “you do you” category, I needed to have one. However, even though I have a larger kitchen now…
…Romain has relegated my stand mixer off the kitchen counter. 😕
It used to bother me; I honestly didn’t think I could live if my mixer wasn’t always within reach, at the ready. But as a baker with a bit of OCD, I do like putting things in places that specifically fit them. So I found a great stainless-steel shelf that holds my mixer, as well as the extra mixing bowl, perfectly. And it’s a happy compromise.
In the interest of “getting to the recipe”…let’s bake some cookies!
The flavor of these cookies comes from brown sugar. In France, moist brown cane sugar is called cassonade and can be found in natural food stores. Sucré vergeoise is made from sugar beets and is also available. (More info on French sugars here.) Commercial brown sugar in America is sometimes white sugar sprayed with molasses syrup, which is okay to use, or you can explore moist natural brown sugars, such as muscovado. Just make sure that whatever brown sugar you use is lump free.
Baking is supposed to be fun and yield delicious treats for you and your friends and family. So there’s no need to stress too much about getting things perfectly shaped, like the dough above is — or isn’t.
When I was starting out in the pastry department at Chez Panisse, I asked owner/pastry chef Lindsey Shere why we didn’t do more structured, classic desserts, and she said, “Most of them don’t taste very good.”
There’s certainly some truth to that, and I’m wary of desserts that are stabilized with gelatin or molded into shapes that look interesting on Instagram but the flavor is secondary. I went to a well-known pastry shop in the U.S. and waited in line for one of their famous pastries, which was so sweet that I could eat only one bite and ended up throwing the rest away. And that’s coming from someone who can literally eat sugar by the spoonful and hates to throw anything away.
That said, to make things a little neater here, in step #5 of the recipe, I trim off the rounded edges of the cookies, which you can bake separately to enjoy as what bakers call “baker’s treats.” In a professional kitchen, you might put them out for other kitchen or dining room staff members to snack on, but at home, it’s okay to keep them for yourself.
The only thing you need to concern yourself with is that, unlike cake batter, you don’t want to beat the heck out of cookie dough when mixing it, which introduces air into the batter. Aeration is what you want for a lofty cake, but not for buttery bites of nutty shortbread.
Brown Sugar Shortbread
About 48 cookies
Adapted from my book, Ripe for Dessert: My Best Recipes
In my original recipe, I called for light brown sugar, but here I used one-third dark brown sugar and two-thirds light brown sugar. (You don’t need to get it exactly right. You can eyeball it.) You can also swap out unsalted butter with salted butter, and omit the flaky sea salt, although I prefer the little éclats (sparkles) of salt in the cookies.
The cookies may crumble a bit at the edges, where the nuts are, when you slice the dough. If that happens, use your fingers to nudge any crumbly bits back into place before baking.
Feel free to swap out the pecans with another nut, such as walnuts, cashews, hazelnuts, or almonds, although almonds are firmer and may cause the cookie dough to crumble a little more when slicing it.
I like to bake these cookies in rectangles, but you can roll the dough into round logs to slice and bake, or roll the cookies on a lightly floured surface and use a cookie cutter to cut them into whatever shape suits your fancy. You do you.
2 cups (280g) flour
1/4 teaspoon flaky sea salt or kosher salt
8 ounces (225g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup packed (140g) light brown sugar, or replace about a third of the light brown sugar with dark brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup (100g) lightly toasted pecans, coarsely chopped
Whisk together the flour and salt in a small bowl.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or in a bowl with a spoon or sturdy spatula, mix the butter with the sugar on low speed, until the mixture is completely smooth and there are no streaks of butter.
Mix in the vanilla, then the flour mixture, until the flour is completely incorporated. Stir in the pecans. At this point, I finish mixing the dough by hand, kneading it slightly, to get the pecans incorporated and so the dough is smooth.
Use your hands to form the dough into a rectangle 4 1/2 x 6 inches (11x13cm). Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or your favorite eco-friendly alternative, and chill the dough until firm, which will take at least 1 hour. (The dough can also be frozen at this point, for future use.)
To bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 350ºF (175ºC). Line a baking sheet or two with parchment paper. (You can use a silicone baking mat, but parchment paper ensures the cookies will be crisper.) Trim the rounded edges of the rectangle of dough with a chef’s knife, so the dough is a neater rectangle. Cut the rectangle of dough lengthwise into two pieces, then slice the dough into rectangles about 1/4-inch (about .75cm) thick, and place them evenly spaced apart on the baking sheet(s).
Bake the cookies until they are nicely golden brown all across the top, turning and rotating the baking sheet(s) midway during baking. They’ll likely take about 15 minutes, but start checking them at the 10- to 12-minute mark since everyone’s oven is different.
Let the cookies cool on a baking sheet, then store in an air-tight container until ready to eat. The cookies are best enjoyed the day they are baked.
The dough can be kept in the refrigerator up to 4 days or frozen for several months.
Note: In step #5, you can bake the trimmed edges of the dough and enjoy them as a baker’s treat.
Brown Sugar Shortbread
About 48 cookies
Adapted from my book, Ripe for Dessert: My Best Recipes
In my original recipe, I called for light brown sugar, but here I used one-third dark brown sugar and two-thirds light brown sugar. (You don’t need to get it exactly right. You can eyeball it.) You can also swap out unsalted butter with salted butter, and omit the flaky sea salt, although I prefer the little éclats (sparkles) of salt in the cookies.
The cookies may crumble a bit at the edges, where the nuts are, when you slice the dough. If that happens, use your fingers to nudge any crumbly bits back into place before baking.
Feel free to swap out the pecans with another nut, such as walnuts, cashews, hazelnuts, or almonds, although almonds are firmer and may cause the cookie dough to crumble a little more when slicing it.
I like to bake these cookies in rectangles, but you can roll the dough into round logs to slice and bake, or roll the cookies on a lightly floured surface and use a cookie cutter to cut them into whatever shape suits your fancy. You be you.
2 cups (280g) flour
1/4 teaspoon flaky sea salt or kosher salt
8 ounces (225g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup packed (140g) light brown sugar, or replace about a third of the light brown sugar with dark brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup (100g) lightly toasted pecans, coarsely chopped
Whisk together the flour and salt in a small bowl.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or in a bowl with a spoon or sturdy spatula, mix the butter with the sugar on low speed, until the mixture is completely smooth and there are no streaks of butter.
Mix in the vanilla, then the flour mixture, until the flour is completely incorporated. Stir in the pecans. At this point, I finish mixing the dough by hand, kneading it slightly, to get the pecans incorporated and so the dough is smooth.
Use your hands to form the dough into a rectangle 4 1/2 x 6 inches (11x13cm). Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or your favorite eco-friendly alternative, and chill the dough until firm, which will take at least 1 hour. (The dough can also be frozen at this point, for future use.)
To bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 350ºF (175ºC). Line a baking sheet or two with parchment paper. (You can use a silicone baking mat, but parchment paper ensures the cookies will be crisper.) Trim the rounded edges of the rectangle of dough with a chef’s knife, so the dough is a neater rectangle. Cut the rectangle of dough lengthwise into two pieces, then slice the dough into rectangles about 1/4-inch (about .75cm) thick, and place them evenly spaced apart on the baking sheet(s).
Bake the cookies until they are nicely golden brown all across the top, turning and rotating the baking sheet(s) midway during baking. They’ll likely take about 15 minutes, but start checking them at the 10- to 12-minute mark since everyone’s oven is different.
Let the cookies cool on a baking sheet, then store in an air-tight container until ready to eat. The cookies are best enjoyed the day they are baked.
The dough can be kept in the refrigerator up to 4 days or frozen for several months.
Note: In step #5, you can bake the trimmed edges of the dough and enjoy them as a baker’s treat.
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When making any kind of cookie I always use two things: my mothers’ 1973 Hobart KitchenAid stand mixer and salted butter. My kids grew up on slightly salty cookies and think all others are bland - which pleases me to no end. Bravo David!
Hi David, these sound wonderful! I've always loved shortbread cookies, especially sableés. One of my favourite, non-chocolate cookies as a child were Lorna Doones.