Cooking with Shortbread: The Uses That Earn a Place in the Pantry

Classic Scottish shortbread is flour, butter, sugar and salt. Walkers, whose story begins with Joseph Walker's bakery in 1898 and which later moved to Aberlour, describes its shortbread as made from just those four ingredients. The dough bakes dry and dense, and the finished biscuit is roughly a quarter fat by weight. Each of those facts suggests a job. The fat means shortbread crumbs arrive already carrying much of their own binder, and the sugar means shortbread sweetens whatever it goes into. The dense, dry crumb is why a thick piece of shortbread can take a brief dunk in tea, as the physics below explains. For baking it from scratch, start with the classic shortbread recipe. This piece covers what to do with shortbread once it is baked.

What shortbread brings to a dish

Butterfat. Filet Bleu's pure-butter palet breton lists 27 grams of fat per 100 grams. The Scottish one-two-three ratio arrives at the same place. In one part sugar, two parts butter and three parts flour, 200 grams of butter goes into 600 grams of dough. US law requires butter to be at least 80 percent milkfat, so that is at least 160 grams of fat, about 27 percent of the raw dough. Sugar. The same palet lists 25 grams of sugar per 100 grams. Salt. Breton biscuits are traditionally made with salted butter, a habit covered below. Dryness. Shortbread is baked dry.

The crumb crust, with more than a third less butter

The standard crumb crust is written for graham crackers. A cheesecake recipe published by the University of California's Master Gardener program is typical: one and a half cups of graham cracker crumbs, a third of a cup of sugar and six tablespoons of melted butter, mixed and pressed into a springform pan. Graham crackers are lean. Honey Maid lists 3 grams of fat in a 30 gram serving, or 10 percent, so most of the fat in that crust comes from the melted butter.

Shortbread crumbs change the arithmetic. King Arthur's ingredient chart puts a cup of graham crumbs at 100 grams and eight tablespoons of butter at 113 grams. The UC crust therefore has 150 grams of crumbs carrying 15 grams of fat, plus 85 grams of butter carrying at least 68 grams more, for about 83 grams of fat in total. The same 150 grams of shortbread crumbs at 27 percent already carry about 40 grams of fat. Reaching the same total takes only about 53 grams of butter, roughly three and three-quarter tablespoons instead of six. Shortbread crumbs are sweet on their own (the palet lists 25 grams of sugar per 100 grams, close to Honey Maid's 8 grams per 30), so taste them before adding the full third of a cup of sugar. Use unsalted butter for the crust, since the biscuit already carries salt (the palet lists 0.6 grams per 100 grams).

Weigh the crumbs instead of measuring them by the cup. King Arthur puts a cup of generic cookie crumbs at 85 grams against 100 for graham, so cup measures drift from one biscuit to the next. Once the crumbs are pressed, chilling sets the butter and holds the base together. A baked filling such as the UC cheesecake bakes the crust along with it.

The table holds the crust's total fat at the level of the UC graham recipe. It assumes butter at 80 percent fat and shortbread at about 27 percent.

In the cup: the physics of the dunk

In 1998 the physicist Len Fisher's experiments on dunking biscuits in tea or coffee made headlines around the world. The story turned on Washburn's equation, which Physics World describes as first derived in 1921 to explain capillary flow in porous materials. Washburn showed that the distance a liquid travels into a porous solid grows with the square root of time. Soaking twice as far takes four times as long, so a thick biscuit holds its center for much longer than a thin one.

The collapse itself, as Times Higher Education summarized Fisher's work, happens because a biscuit's sugar and fat dissolve while its starch absorbs liquid until the weakened structure gives way. His advice was to dunk the biscuit sideways, and an impermeable layer such as chocolate adds waterproof strength. By that logic, a thick palet or a shortbread finger, dipped briefly and sideways, should soften at the surface before its middle gives way. The black tea brewing recipe covers the pot, and the black tea buying guide covers the label. Mariage Frères English Breakfast is one black tea to pour alongside (shop Mariage Frères English Breakfast).

Broken over ice cream, with salted caramel

The Breton palet points to its region's other famous sweet. Brittany was exempt from the gabelle, the royal salt tax that Philippe VI turned into a crown monopoly in the 1340s. As Taste France tells it, that exemption let the region's farmers work local Guérande salt into their butter. Henri Le Roux, the Breton chocolatier who opened his shop in Quiberon in 1977, created his salted butter caramel there.

A thick palet broken into rough pieces over vanilla ice cream, with a spoonful of the salted caramel sauce recipe poured over, makes a two-minute dessert. Filet Bleu's palets bretons (shop Filet Bleu Palets Bretons) are made with 25 percent concentrated butter. The Filet Bleu producer guide tells the company's story, and the Brittany salted butter and caramel guide covers the region.

Rubble and rounds: chocolate salami and the jam sandwich

Crushed to coarse rubble, shortbread becomes the inclusion in a set chocolate dessert. The chocolate salami recipe folds 175 grams of biscotti or dry butter cookies, broken to pea-size pieces, into melted dark chocolate and butter. Biscotti stay crunchy inside the chocolate for days; butter cookies give a more tender slice. The biscotti and butter cookies guide compares the two families. Left whole, two shortbread rounds sandwiched with a sharp jam make a finished sweet.

On the board

At the sweet end of a cheese board, plain shortbread sits well beside a hard, nutty cheese and a few dried apricots. For the savory end, the sablé also comes as a cracker. Goulibeur's savory sablés are made with Comté AOP (shop Goulibeur Comté Sablés). The cheese course accompaniments guide matches honey, mostarda and membrillo to cheese styles, and the crackers guide covers the savory side of the plate.

Which shortbread for which job

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com.

Sources & Further Reading

• Walkers Shortbread: history and heritage since 1898 (the four-ingredient recipe)
• University of California Master Gardeners: Cheesecake (graham cracker crust)
• Mondelēz: Honey Maid Honey Graham Crackers, nutrition facts
• Open Food Facts: Filet Bleu Palet Breton Pur Beurre, ingredients and nutrition
• King Arthur Baking: Ingredient Weight Chart
• 21 U.S.C. 321a: the legal definition of butter (80 percent milkfat)
• Physics World: Physics, biscuits and the public (1999)
• E. W. Washburn, The Dynamics of Capillary Flow, Physical Review 17, 273 (1921)
• arXiv: Modelling capillary filling dynamics using lattice Boltzmann simulations (Washburn's law)
• Times Higher Education: Always choose a chocolate dip (2003)
• Taste France: Salted Butter Caramel
• France Today: Henri Le Roux
• The Pantry Kitchen: Shortbread, and Why It Should Come Out Pale
• The Pantry Kitchen: Chocolate Salami