How to Make the Best Scottish Shortbread (recipe from Tartine Bakery in San Francisco)

hi there welcome back i'm pam and we're in my kitchen again where i share with you some of my favorite recipes or those most requested by my friends and family today we're going to be making scottish shortbread and the recipe comes from tartine bakery in san francisco now if you've ever been you know that you're probably going to wait in a long line and it may go out the door and around the building if you get there when their fresh bread is out of the oven well i have been in the habit of buying shortbread when i go there and a couple years ago i was in a bookstore and i came across their cookbook which i did not know they had and there right on the cover was a shortbread that i go in and buy all the time so i was really excited i bought the cookbook and i made it and it turned out exactly the way it does at tartine and i got rid of all the other shortbread recipes that i had clipped out of magazines because this one is superior now it is melt-in-your-mouth delicate it does not have a crunch it doesn't snap or it's not tough you know some shortbread cookies are just a little bit on the hard side this recipe is the best as far as i'm concerned i hope you give it a try and let me know what you think but anyway let's get started first thing very important your butter has to be super soft now in the winter time that's a little bit hard to accomplish because for one i don't keep my house very warm i like a cooler temperature and butter at room temperature is still too hard in the winter so if you're like me and your house is cool and you can't get the butter to a consistency of mayonnaise you can turn on your oven to about 250 300 shut it off open the door and set your bowl of diced up butter on the shelf and just let it get really soft it will start to glisten and you might get a little bit of meltiness at the bottom you don't want to melt the butter even though the recipe does say that if you forget to soften your butter you can melt it a little bit but that always makes me nervous because when i think of recipes where you either melt butter or you use solid butter and there's a totally different outcome so i always try to not melt it but just get it really soft and as you can see this is the consistency of mayonnaise and we're going to put it in your bowl and we're going to add our salt i'm using table salt to be honest i don't usually but the recipe just says salt it doesn't specify kosher salt and normally what i use in recipes is sea salt but sea salt can be rather coarse even if you buy the fine grind some of it's fine and some of it's kind of rocky and it just wouldn't dissolve now this takes a little bit of time it's uh important to dissolve the salt so we don't get salt crystals in our baked shortbread so you're going to mix this 2-3 minutes just keep mixing what i tend to do is mix then i go over and i measure my ingredients and i sift and then i come back and i mix some more but you know that takes some time and since we're doing a video we'll do it a little differently today but anyway you get your salt dissolved into your butter and the way you can tell and you can use a whisk or spatula or a wooden spoon it really doesn't matter but just stick your finger in there and run some between your fingers and if you still feel some really coarse granules then keep mixing now i will be honest with you i don't always get it entirely dissolved but i think that's okay the product always turns out finished product always turns out really nice so you just keep mixing and you test it i can still feel a little bit of salt in there so i'm going to keep on now shortbread i don't know if you know this but it dates back to medieval scotland apparently um mary queen of scots was extremely fond of shortbread which popularized it in the 1500s unfortunately it was an extravagant luxury and common people couldn't afford it because it had butter in it and butter was expensive so they had shortbread during the holidays or maybe a wedding that kind of thing okay this is really soft it it looks like mayonnaise doesn't it or whipping cream really softly whipped cream and i think this tests pretty well now i can just tell sometimes you can just rub the back of your spatula against the bottom of the bowl and you won't see any granules so what you do next is you add your sugar now sugar unlike salt will dissolve pretty readily especially when it heat is applied so when it starts baking the sugar will dissolve so all we're going to do here is mix it in until it's incorporated we're not going to have to do any heavy blending just get your sugar mixed in there okay so i have a sifter and a bowl and i've got some cornstarch which i'm going to add to my sifter and my flower and you're just going to sift those two together and add that to the butter salt and sugar and we're just going to mix it until it is incorporated if you overwork it you're going to have a tough dough and you don't want your shortbread to be tough now if you don't like using cornstarch or you're allergic to corn or whatever you can use rice flour or potato starch i like the corn starch myself i like the texture of it the other two might change the texture a little bit but it'll still be pleasant it'll be good so any of those three are fine when making shortbread so we're just going to mix this in to get a smooth dough something i was thinking about as i was making shortbread years ago was why is it called shortbread and after doing a little research i found out that well i knew that baked goods cookies and pastries in baking terms were referred to as short because amount of fat to flour was high and so that term short goes along with anything like pastries or cookies because of the high fat content but what i didn't know was that in that short pastry the gluten strands are actually short as well the fat prevents gluten from elongating in rich pastries whereas when we make bread the gluten strands are long and strong because there isn't fat in bread usually and if there is it's just a little bit and when we need bread dough those gluten strands get even stronger and longer just a little trivia all right so i've got a nice dough formed all the flour has been worked in without overworking it now the recipe does say to use a glass pan that's six by ten inches i have never used glass making this recipe and it always turns out really nice i think they state that so that you can kind of check the color on the bottom of the pan when you're baking your shortbread but i have been able to judge it from the color on the top and it always comes out really nice so this is a usa pan i love my usa pans this one is about 12 inches by five and a half as long as the area in your pan equals somewhere in that range of a six by ten or a twelve by five or whatever you'll be fine you want your shortbread to be about two-thirds of an inch thick and not much thicker they do specify that and there's probably maybe it's the way that it would cook in the long run if it was too thick it might not cook all the way through now i would normally grease this with butter because this is shortbread and it's pure butter recipe but to save time and not to get too messy i'm just going to spray it which is fine if you want to use cooking spray you don't need a heavy coat because this is very buttery and what we're going to do is just press this into our pan in an even layer and one thing i do love about i do have a glass pan you know i think we've probably all got a glass pyrex pan in our kitchen somewhere but i love the straight sides and the very square corners of this usa pan so when i cut my shortbread everything is very uniform okay so now i'm just going to get in here with clean hands and i'm going to press it in when you're making shortbread historically anyway shortbread was either made into fingers they'd call it or bars as we'd probably say in the states we're going to cut these into fingers they're just little strips or they could be shaped into cookies and i'm not actually sure if this recipe you could use it as a cookie recipe and shape it you definitely have to chill the dough because this is way too soft to cut out or they would make what's called petticoat tails and that you would cook in like a pie dish and then cut it into big wedges but i think this recipe would not be ideal in that capacity because it's very tender and soft and i'm not sure that such a big wedge wouldn't would just be too much weight for um too heavy and it might break because this is very delicate so i have pressed it into my pan and i could if i wanted to spend more time you know be a little neater but you just press it in evenly and you're going to bake it in a 325 oven the recipe calls for 30 minutes approximately i'll be honest with you i usually bake it for 40. but my oven tends to be a little slow and even with the oven thermometer in there saying it's 325 it i like it a little darker maybe so anyway you bake it and i'll show you what you do when it comes out of the oven all right our shortbread is out of the oven and as i told you it baked for about 40 minutes in my oven and that may be because i'm using metal instead of glass i'm not really sure but i've got a nice color to the shortbread and i've let it cool for about 15 or 20 minutes you want to be able to handle the pan and the shortbread should be warm to the touch so what we're going to do is we're going to take some ultra fine sugar if you don't have it you can use granulated but the recipe calls for ultra fine and we're going to just sprinkle it on top of the shortbread give it an even layer and i did try to knock off some of the little um sugar bumps in here you can see there's some little little um spots that are kind of little rocks you know sugar but anyway just touch them with your finger and then just shake the pan around cover the top with the sugar and then come over to the sink and carefully knock out as much as you can you don't want to lose the shortbread i find it's easier to let it gather in a corner down there then tipping it like this for fear that the whole thing will drop out so if you get it in a corner it just it just comes on out really easily so there's our shortbread now with a coating of fine sugar then you take a sharp knife and you cut it into fingers is what they call it or bars i cut right down the middle you want about half inch to an inch pieces i think the recipe in the directions seemed a little tiny a little small i like to cut a more generous piece but you just go through and you cut your serving size pieces and you need to do this when this is warm if you don't it's going to crumble when you cut it later so it has to be cut while it's warm so i will finish cutting that in a few minutes what i made yesterday is in the refrigerator because the recipe highly recommends that you refrigerate the shortbread before you take it out of the tin now these happen to be tart pans so it just lifts out really easily and i don't think i really actually needed to refrigerate this because they're both tart pans but that there the bottom doesn't pop up easily so you would refrigerate it and let the butter in the shortbread get a little firm and then it would be easier to remove and the first one may come out a little messy use a offset spatula and after that the rest of the pieces will just lift right out so anyway i just wanted to show you the different types of pans you can use this one takes a little more work because you want to get the shortbread in all the little grooves but if you use a tart pan and i think i will use my my offset spatula in here to loosen it well where is it now there we go there so those pieces come apart i actually think i like not chilling the dough i think it comes out of the pan a little easier but you can experiment with that so there we have it and you just go underneath and loosen your shortbread just start stacking it on your serving plate and there you have it five simple ingredients for delicious scottish shortbread i appreciate you watching if you're enjoying my videos please give them a thumbs up and subscribe and if you'd like to be notified hit the bell hey thank you see you next time bye you

Channel: Pamela’s Favorite Recipes

Views: 10,882

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Id: 8sbtcHoKzJc

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021