Classic cookies fit into modern holiday baking
In a year of super-fusion cuisine and pumped up pro-biotic, fiber-full foods, it's no wonder that when it comes to holiday cookies we crave comfort.
Not cookies coated in ginger-kissed white chocolate ganache or infused with Chinese five-spice powder. But not boring either, mind you. Just simple, tasty cookies that remind us of grandma's house.
Something like a butter cookie, that balanced, delectable cookie that shines on a plate whether it's shaped or spritzed, dipped or decorated, frosted or fluted.
“If you were to strip away the different flavors and textures from many of the classic cookies around the world, you would be left with a basic butter cookie,” says Leslie Glover Pendelton in the introduction to her 1998 book “One Dough. Fifty Cookies” (William Morrow).
That book has been on my shelf for more than a decade now, and around this time of year I find myself referring to the big batch of Master Dough more than the dozens of variations within.
“Butter cookies is a term that's used rather loosely,” says Sara Moulton, former executive chef at Gourmet who worked on the late magazine's latest book, “The Gourmet Cookie Book: The Single Best Recipe from Each Year 1941 to 2009.”
“Butter, flour, sugar, salt, no leavening and rather crisp,” she adds by way of definition. That said, a good butter cookie can only be as good as its butter. And that butter should be unsalted, Moulton says. Salted butter would, well, make your cookies too salty.
“Always start with the freshest butter,” she adds. Look for consistent color of your butter; discoloration means it could be going bad, she said.
To maintain freshness, store it in the back of the fridge where it's the coldest, not in the door where butter gets exposed to warmer air.
“The Gourmet Cookie Book” contains six variations on butter cookies that all use “good ol' American butter, like Breakstone or Land O'Lakes,” she says. Baking with higher-fat, European-style butter, like Plugra, will change the taste as well as the texture.
In 2004's “Baking Illustrated,” the editors at Cook's Illustrated magazine found, surprisingly enough, that the best butter cookies contain a bit of cream cheese. In their goal to achieve the perfect butter cookie they tested batches with shortening, buttermilk, sour cream.
“The cream cheese … was just right,” they write. “It gave the cookies flavor and richness without altering their texture.”
They maintain that the cookies bake up crisp yet sturdy enough to hold up to glazes, frosting and other decorations.
Butter cookie basics
<b>Butter cookie basics</b><P>
To ensure your cookies bake up perfect every time, follow this advice:<P>
• Use unsalted butter.<P>
• Soften the butter, but not too much. It should still be cool.<P>
• If the recipe calls for sifted flour, sift before measuring. If it calls for, for example, 3 cups flour, sifted, sift after measuring.<P>
• Use the type of flour specified in the recipe; changing up the flour alters the gluten ratio and will affect the texture.<P>
• Don't overmix the dough; doing so will create a tough cookie.<P>
• If the dough gets too warm while rolling or shaping, chill it.<P>
• Reroll dough only once (see overmixing).<P>
• Do not use dark pans. If that's all you have, line them with foil.<P>
• Bake one cookie sheet at a time in the center of the oven.<P>
<I><B>Sara Moulton, “Baking Illustrated”</B></I><P>