Our New Favorite Shortbread
With its richness and melt-in-your-mouth texture,
shortbread is as easy to love as it is to make.
Yet, we recently found a way to pump up its appeal even more:
browned butter. In such a simple recipe, the nuttiness of the butter shines in every last delicate crumb.
The only catch? You have to melt butter to brown it, but traditional shortbread relies on chilled butter. It forms tiny pockets of solid fat throughout the dough, which separate the layers of gluten and give the shortbread its signature flaky, delicate texture. When I tried using melted browned butter straight from the stovetop, the fat incorporated evenly throughout the dough instead. The result was cookies that tasted great but were also crumbly, dense, and greasy.
So, after browning the butter, I took the time to chill it until it was opaque and cool. Beating that butter into the sugar resulted in a dough that baked up much lighter.
Then I wondered if I could dial up the flavor even more by adding a complementary ingredient: milk powder. Sure enough, the added sugars and proteins encouraged more Maillardization, giving the cookies a beautiful tawny hue.
Before I knew it, my colleagues had followed their noses to my tray and were nearly battling over the shortbread, going back for seconds and stashing the leftovers away for later.
The finished cookies look simple, but their toffee-like aroma reveals their complexity →
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