Salted Chocolate Shard Shortbread Recipe on Food52 (2024)

FAQs

Do you use salted or unsalted butter in shortbread? ›

Normally when I make Cookies, I always use unsalted butter so I can control the salt content, but I found with shortbread that when you add salt yourself, the salt never really dissolves or disperses as well. Using salted butter ensures even seasoning, and in my experience, a better cookie.

Should butter be cold or room temperature for making shortbread? Always start with cold butter straight from the refrigerator. This will keep the dough from warming up, making it greasy and difficult to roll out.

The most common mistakes when making shortbread are over-working the dough, and incorporating too much flour. The less you work the dough, the more crumbly and melt-in-your-mouth your shortbread cookies will be.

Chilling the dough before baking will help the shortbread keep their shape while cooking. In the oven, the dough will spread as the butter in the mixture melts, but baking it from chilled helps reduce this effect. It's most important to do this if you are baking the shortbread in individual biscuits.

The key with shortbread is not to overhandle it. Make the dough exactly as instructed, but don't mess around making shapes or over rolling the dough - you will end up with delicious but tough biscuits. Stretching and pulling the dough activates the gluten in the flour, making chewy cookies and not crisp ones.

Since you will be cooking your shortbread in the lower third of the oven, you will get some top browning as the cookie bakes. The surface of the shortbread should be a toasty light brown when it is cooked. It should never appear raw or slightly opaque in the middle.

Baking recipes typically call for unsalted butter because the amount of salt in salted butter varies depending on the brand – there is no “industry standard.” For example, if you use one brand of salted butter in a recipe, and we use another, our baked goods could end up tasting very different from one other.

If you only have salted butter, go ahead and use it .. just do NOT add the salt that the recipe calls for. It should be just fine when making cookies. Even just 50 years ago, recipes never specific salted/unsalted butter.

When to Use Salted Butter. This is the best kind of butter to use for the table and general cooking uses, says Giambroni. That's because when you're slathering it on a piece of warm bread, for example, the saltiness helps to bring out the rich flavor and enhances the experience for your taste buds.

Why do sugar cookies call for unsalted butter? ›

Here's why: Most importantly: unsalted butter ensures that you can control the amount of salt you add to your cakes, cookies and Fig and Almond Breakfast Cake. Different companies add different amounts of salt to their butter.