Salted Butter Has Always Been the Secret to Better Cookies
Alison Roman’s Salted Butter Chocolate Shortbreads are everywhere. Bon Appétit , Eater , Nylon , Smitten Kitchen and The New York Times have covered them in vivid detail; Cookies appear in my Instagram search feed literally every day. The best recipes are more than just the sum of their parts, but the sheer number of breathless, goggle-eyed reviews suggest that a certain number of people still have lived a poor life without salty butter and biscuits.
For example, I welcome the Roman salted butter Naessans with open arms, because unsalted butter is completely meaningless. I fry the eggs in salted butter and of course I put them on the toast, but I also bake them exclusively on it. I believe that salt not only makes food taste good; it gives the food a flavor , period. I substitute unsalted for unsalted in a one-to-one ratio without even reducing the amount of salt required in the recipe, because I firmly believe that an extra half teaspoon of salt cannot harm a recipe with a combined four glasses of flour and sugar. Salted butter baked goods still border on taboo for most, and by demanding it, Cookies have allowed thousands of home chefs to do something really naughty. This, I think, is the secret of their popularity.
The cookie backlash hasn’t started yet, but now it can’t last much longer. It is easy and lazy to give up popular things just because they are ubiquitous, especially when they are consumed mainly by women and girls – like cookbooks. After all, the cooler types have long cherished an irresistible hatred of female popular media instead of a real person, usually in the name of “originality” or “innovation.” I am not a Ph.D. studying media, but it seems clear to me that cultural phenomena are not born when new lands are discovered. Instead, they turn to something long-standing, almost universal at the right time, and thus tell us more about human experience than any Gallup survey. The Beatles didn’t invent cute boys or four-man groups, Elle James definitely didn’t invent BDSM slash, and Alison Roman didn’t invent the salted butter shortbread; she just told us about it at the right time.
I think it’s worth thinking about what prompted us to this recipe. Thanks to the trickling down molecular cuisine, home cooking has become complex, expensive, and overly prescriptive for at least fifteen years. Dining In – Roman’s second cookbook and source of cookies – is full of quirky, exciting recipes that offer a fresh take on familiar ingredients and techniques while remaining fully accessible. In other words, it is the ideological opposite of Modernist Cuisine or Food Lab . Already in the fourth edition, people are clearly buying what Dining In is selling. As for the Cookies themselves, it could be argued that they followed the salty caramel mania of the early 2010s to its natural end and then made things worse. (Oddly enough, most salted caramel recipes require unsalted butter and then make up for the difference with puff salt. Why? ) After a decade of obsessive iterations of chocolate chip cookies and a whole generation of Olds aggressively trying to use salted butter in baked goods, it’s no wonder the cookie recipe. who launched a thousand posts is so simple – and so shamelessly salty.
Somewhere between the first and fiftieth Google searches for the history of unsalted butter (baking was not mandatory until the late 20th century, probably because the poor and middle class relied on salt to preserve a relatively expensive ingredient), I thought that to me, I should probably make those damn cookies myself. I’m no stranger to salted butter shortbread cookies, and they looked so simple to my relatively experienced eye that I wondered what such a fuss could be about. Basically, you are making shortbread dough cookies with one special twist: the demerara sugar crust. Putting my precious logs in the refrigerator to cool down, I took a few bites of dough from the mixer spatula – and suddenly decided that I felt great about my choice.
I am so pleased to inform you that even among the salty buttery biscuits, “Romanskoe” is exceptional. I was ready for the caramel taste that the salted butter cookie dough takes on as it turns brown, and I already knew how I felt for dark chocolate cookies covered in sea salt –I’m for them! – but what struck me was the complexity of the three types of sugar. The mixture of white and light brown in the dough is pretty standard, but rolling the dough in raw sugar (which I grumbled about because I had to go on Trader Joe’s special trip) ended up with the most exciting lace edged biscuits I’ve ever had. -or tried it. … As I write this, I gaze longingly at the cooling rack, half filled with cookies that I shouldn’t eat anymore until my boyfriend gets home, and I try to congratulate myself on having “common sense” to freeze a second cookie. a log of dough for later.
Depending on the flexibility of your personal beliefs, a simple suggestion to put salted butter in a cookie may be enough to make you scream in the comment section to tell me how worthless I am, generation after generation punk ass girl. This would be a mistake on at least two sides: firstly, it’s the highest compliment I could ever hope to receive, and secondly, an irrational fear of salty butter is a great way to skip a whole world of delicious treats. Yes, I know that unsalted butter has a shorter shelf life – and therefore more fluidity on the shelves, which some interpret as meaning it is necessarily fresher than salted – and I know that salted oil tends to have more water, especially if its salinity is due to strong brine, not granular salt. I’ve heard all the arguments to the contrary and still choose salted butter because it tastes better to me. If you’re still skeptical, just make a cookie – it’ll help.
(Complete recipe below.)
Alison Roman Salted Butter Chocolate Shortbread
Ingredients:
For the cookie dough:
- 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (9 oz / 255 grams) cold salt butter, cut into small chunks
- 1/2 cup (100 g) granulated sugar
- 1/4 cup (50 grams) light brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract
- 2 1/4 cups (295 g) all-purpose flour
- 170 grams of semi-sweet or bitter dark chocolate
For sugar coating:
- 1 large egg
- Coarse sugar (I used turbinado) for rolling
- Coarse or flaked sea salt for dusting
Instructions:
Chop the chocolate coarsely with a sharp chef’s knife. You want hefty chunks, not thin strips, so don’t value that too much.
Then, using a hand or stand mixer, beat the butter, granulated and brown sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. It will take at least five full minutes in a stand mixer and a few minutes longer in a hand mixer. Add flour, stir until smooth, then add chocolate and do the same. The mixture will be a little crumbly, which is normal.
Divide the dough into two sheets of parchment paper, waxed paper, or plastic wrap and use your hands to shape the dough into logs about 2 inches in diameter. Refrigerate for 2 hours. ( Do ahead of time; prepared logs will keep in the refrigerator for a week, and in the freezer for a month. Note that it becomes more difficult to cut them if they are left in the refrigerator for more than 2 hours; if you need to freeze them or place them in refrigerator overnight, let them sit at room temperature for half an hour before slicing.)
When you’re ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 350ºF and line one or two baking sheets with parchment paper. Remove the biscuits from the refrigerator, lightly beat the egg and brush the edges of the dough with it. Sprinkle, pat, and / or add sugar until completely covered.
Slice the cookies into half-inch round circles using a sharp, serrated knife or a chef’s knife. When you hit a piece of cold chocolate – which you do – proceed with caution and be patient. Smooth saw movements help with the serrated knife; gentle downward pressure helps the chef’s knife.
Spread the cookie slices one inch apart on the prepared sheets and season with salt as you like. Place in hot oven and bake for 12-15 minutes, until edges are brown. Refrigerate in skillet for a few minutes, then transfer to wire rack to finish. Baked cookies will last for about five days in an airtight container.