Food - Drink
A Simple Trick For Better Textured Shortbread
By KALEA MARTIN
You may think of shortbread as just another kind of cookie, but shortbread has a much higher ratio of butter to flour, making it denser than most other cookies with a distinct melt-in-your-mouth texture. However, more density means shortbread can turn out hard and crunchy, rather than buttery and crumbly.
Problems with shortbread can occur when the dough is overworked or not chilled for long enough. While chilling the dough twice during the prep process can help you avoid one of these pitfalls, a better method from Hungarian culinary tradition solves both problems by using one unexpected tool: a cheese grater.
Instead of sticking the dough in the fridge, put it in the freezer; once it's frozen solid, grate it into shreds using the cheese grater and lightly pack the shreds together. The shreds will melt together during baking, and because the dough is cold and not packed together as tightly, you'll achieve a crumbly texture instead of a hard and crunchy one.