The shortbread execrise

It’s easier and more forgiving to cook than it is to bake. Baking involves greater technical skill, precise measurements, exacting recipes and accurate temperatures.

Nor can a baker completely rely on a recipe book, as ingredients are not necessarily made equal. Every batch of dry ingredients varies in moisture content, for instance, depending on things such as the weather. Cream and butter products made here are different than those found in other markets.

New Zealand has a sound heritage in home baking and mixing bowl passion, with its rich dairy produce, ‘country institute’ baking competitions, and passionate Mums and Grannies passing scrapbooks full of recipes onto daughters and even sons.

Long may it continue. There’s even more reason to keep the home ‘baking fresh and eating fresh’ tradition in this country going because of the increasing use of ‘additives’, preservatives and especially artificial trans-fats in commercial baking, which are those fats that are by-products in hydrogenated oils chemically altered to increase shelf-life. These fats cost a lot less than butter, canola, sunflower and corn oils, and are very resistant to rancidity, but on the downside, research since the 1990s indicates, that trans-fats raise levels of so-called bad cholesterol.

Baking lesson - shortbread

It’s not often you come across someone that doesn’t like shortbread, or doesn’t have a fond childhood memory of Mum’s or Nan’s sugar-coated square slabs or triangles secured away in an airtight jar to be opened on family visitations over tea and coffee.

Easy and inexpensive to make, although there are only three major and common ingredients involved in making shortbread biscuit, there is a surprising variety of recipes out there.

They all use a combination of sifted flour, butter and castor sugar, kneaded / bound into a firm dough, rolled out to about 2cm thick, cut to shape and baked at 180c for around 20 minutes until a soft golden brown (with a keen eye kept on the ‘browning’ process).

The more complicated shortbread recipes would typically use, say, 250g of unsalted (or salted) butter, 250g plain flour, 125g Castor sugar and another 125g ground rice or semolina for texture. Some recipes cream the butter and sugar before the flour goes in, some don’t.

Using the above recipe, cream butter and sugar and mix in the flour with a wooden spoon until you get a waxy dough and form it into a ball. Roll it out lightly on baking paper to around 2cm thick and cut into fingers. You can also lightly roll the dough into a ‘tube’ and cut off segments to form rounds (see photo). Refrigerate the fingers for an hour so they keep their shape while cooking. There’s a tradition of making marks or pricks on top of the dough with the tines of a fork, but up you. You can also dust the hot shortbread with granular sugar or, when cool, with sifted icing sugar, but not necessarily.

Pre-heat oven to 180c and bake around 20 minutes until the shortbread turns a slight golden colour – different recipes seem to colour quicker than others, so keep a keen eye on the last baking stages.

Always store your baked shortbread in an airtight container because the butter makes then go soft over time.

Simplicity rewarded

Perhaps the easiest shortbread recipe can be found in Claire Clark’s cookbook, ‘Indulge, a 100 perfect Desserts’, published in 2005. Although a baking professional, Clark has written this book for the home cook with a very useful "Secrets of Success" section at the beginning of each chapter.

Over the past decade, Clark has taken her childhood passion for baking to a status as an internationally acclaimed pastry chef, leaving her expert tasty touch at the likes of The Ritz Hotel in London, the afternoon tea lawns of Buckingham Palace, the pastry department at the UK House of Commons and, most recently, The French Laundry in Northern California, one of the top restaurants in the world.

Clark visited Auckland at the beginning of spring as a guest of the Restaurant Association and she demonstrated her simple but beautiful shortbread recipe from her cookbook at a press conference.

Clark, from England, says her shortbread recipe is her mother’s. It came to culinary fame when she turned up for work at The French Laundry as a pastry chef and owner/operator Thomas Keller asked her for something to present to diners as edible mementoes when they left the restaurant.

“Thomas asked me if I can make shortbread. I love shortbread. Every time I went back to England I bought shortbread, particularly from Portland and Mason,” she says.

“I thought of making all sorts of different types … creating a huge task for myself. . . then I thought - my mum makes really good shortbread.”

And, as sure as eggs are eggs, her boss took a shining to her mum’s recipe.

“It’s the least messed around and is pure and simple,” she says, adding that the French Laundry has its own cow and makes its own butter for the extra wow factor.

Clark’s advice to any home baker is to use ingredients such as butter, milk and eggs at room temperature, and arm yourself with a set of good scales. Don’t rely on utensils to measure dry weights, that are designed to measure liquids – such as cups.

Her mother’s recipe as published in her cookbook uses 225g of sifted flour, 75g of castor sugar and 150g of unsalted butter. Interestingly, some shortbread recipes use a pinch of salt, so whether you use unsalted or salted butter may be a moot point.

Clark’s recipe is also different in that the butter and sugar are not creamed – simply added together and the butter rubbed into the flour with the finger tips.

Clark’s shortbread recipe also features a subtle natural flavouring that you will find in her book.

The taste test

Allowing for the fact we are cooking in a basic kitchen environment, we baked the two shortbread recipes above and presented them to an unscientific panel of ‘shortbread lovers’. Both recipes were showered with compliments but Clark’s recipe came out as the favourite by a country mile, described as “soft, but crunchy, and more buttery”. 

Spring 2009 - by Alan Titchall

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