In episode 39 learn how to make gluten-free shortbread cookies with an extra easy, foolproof recipe! The secret to tender, classic GF shortbread is briefly chilling the dough and baking at a lower oven temperature. Choose between the slice and bake or cut-out method to make 4-ingredient, melt in your mouth biscuits. Join Melissa, gluten-free cookbook author, as she shares many easy, pro tips to make this audio recipe for gluten-free shortbread without a gritty, crumbly dry texture!
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Transcript
Hey everyone, I’m Melissa Erdelac, host of the Gluten Free Recipe Challenge podcast and creator behind the gluten free website Mamagourmand. Here we take beloved recipes you thought you never enjoy again and transform them into easy copycat versions just as good as the originals.
Just a little heads up. I can get quite passionate about gluten-free baking, which may come out in some colorful language. If this offends you, I might not be your cup of tea. If you are intrigued, but sensitive ears are around, put some headphones on and let’s do this.
This week’s episode I selfishly did for you because I never really understood people’s fascination with shortbread. Those trefoil Girl Scout cookies were always the ones that my mom got and she loved. And I would think, this isn’t a freaking cookie.
There’s no chocolate. There’s no chewiness. We’d call them mom’s gross cookies , which I’m sure she loved. So I ignored shortbread for years, but apparently it’s just something you have to mature into because this recipe testing process kinda turned me into a shortbread animal.
When it’s just the right amount of sweetness and has a tender, buttery crumb instead of dry and sandy, because believe me, that’s definitely where I started, it hits. So I stand corrected, Mom. Sorry for all those times I tried to get you to remove the 1 from the order form.
Good news, I made a lot of bad shortbread cookies, so you don’t have to. It turns out that three simple ingredients can go through a lot of permutations. To make shortbread, you need butter, lots of it, gluten free flour, and powdered sugar. I also added a little salt because I always use unsalted butter, and it enhances the flavor, and then vanilla extract too for a hint of creaminess.
Okay, here’s where my baking epiphanies led me to. Butter. It can’t be completely softened and room temperature, but it can’t be completely chilled either. Set it out long enough that it has some give to it, but it still feels cold to the touch. I found that using butter that’s slightly chilled incorporated into the flour evenly, but wasn’t so warm that the dough became sticky when you try to roll it out.
For the flour, I use and highly recommend cup for cup gluten free flour, which has cornstarch in the flour blend, and this makes the cookie dough really easy to work with and softens the texture. Also for the flour, you want to make sure that you don’t add too much of it. You need just the right amount of butter to flour ratio, enough that you have a workable dough that you can roll out, but not so much that it leaves you with like a dry, dusty cookie.
And then the powdered sugar. I use powdered sugar over granulated sugar for this because it made the texture a little lighter and not as crunchy as when you use granulated sugar.
The other big game changer came in when I experimented with chilling the dough. Most recipes you have to shape and cut out the dough straight away, and although the dough is technically workable enough to do this right after it’s mixed together, don’t do it.
I tested the cookies with chilling versus not chilling and they turned out more tender and less gritty after a brief chill and the operative word here is brief. You can’t chill the dough too long or the butter will completely resolidify and the dough becomes very hard to work with. So 20 minutes was the magical time.
Other than that, actually the recipe is really quick and easy to mix together. First, in a large mixing bowl, beat together 14 tablespoons of your slightly chilled butter with three-fourths cup of powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a half a teaspoon of salt, and mix that together until it’s smooth.
Then you add 1 and three-fourths cup of gluten free flour. When you start to mix that together, at first the dough will look dry, and you’ll probably be a little worried, but just keep mixing. The butter eventually works itself into the flour and you’ll be all good. If you use a different gluten free flour, it might have some different outcomes.
If the dough doesn’t come together, add just a small dash of water, like no more than a teaspoon, and try again. You want to avoid adding too much water, or when you bake the cookies, they will spread too much.
At this point, your dough’s done. And you have two options depending on how you’re going to shape the cookies.
One option is a slice and bake. And the other option is you can make these like cutout cookies. You can roll out the dough and use cookie cutters. So for the slice and bake option, once you have the dough mixed together, take a piece of parchment paper and lay it on your work surface, and then shape the dough into a log, just roll it into a smooth log, and then roll up the dough in the parchment paper and place it in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.
If you’re going to do the cutout method, then just wrap the dough in plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, you either slice it into a half inch rounds and place them on ungreased baking sheets or parchment lined baking sheets, or roll out the dough into a half inch thickness and then use cookie cutters, or I use biscuit cutters so it was like a perfectly round shape, to cut out the dough, place it on your baking sheets, and then repeat it until all the dough is used up.
If you aren’t baking the cookies straight away, so if you’re oven can’t handle all the baking sheets at once and you need to sit a baking sheet out, what you want to do is store those baking sheets in the refrigerator. Don’t set them out at room temperature until you can put them in the oven.
If the dough warms up, then they’ll have a tendency to spread and lose their shape when you’re baking.
If the dough falls apart when you’re slicing or rolling it out, it probably means the dough was chilled too long.
If it’s chilled too long, it will crumble slightly when you’re working with it. So if it’s too frustrating, just leave the dough at room temperature to soften slightly and then try again. Also, if your dough is too sticky or soft, as you’re trying to work with it, you have two options. First, you could just try to briefly chill the dough again, which is what I would do. And then as a last resort, you can add a little gluten free flour to your work surface. I always try not to add more flour into recipes because it dries it out . But if you have to, I would take a little bit of gluten free flour and I put it on my rolling pin instead of sprinkling flour on my work surface, because then it doesn’t add as much flour into the dough.
If you want to use these as a make ahead christmas cookie, the dough can be made up to one day ahead of time and stored in the refrigerator. But note that you will have to set it out for about 20 to 30 minutes to soften it before you roll or slice it. And the same thing goes, you could also freeze the dough before baking. Wrap it securely and freeze it and then thaw overnight in the fridge. But the same thing, you’ll have to set it out at room temperature before you use it. The better option if you want to do make ahead cookies would be to make the dough, go ahead and shape it, either slice it or cut it out, and then freeze those unbaked cookies. Then when you’re ready to serve them, you can bake them right from frozen. You would just add a minute to your baking time.
Shortbread dough is also a great canvas to morph this into a lot of variations. You could take the cookies and dip half in chocolate or drizzle chocolate over the top. You can make lemon shortbread by adding a tablespoon of lemon zest to the dough and replace the vanilla extract with lemon extract. And then also if you want, you could do a lemon glaze on top and that would just be mixed together, a cup of powdered sugar with two tablespoons of lemon juice. You could do a spiced Shortbread, so I would add up to a teaspoon of spices such as cinnamon or ginger or nutmeg.
You could do a cranberry orange, so add chopped, dried cranberries to the dough, and a tablespoon of orange zest. And then you could also replace the vanilla extract with orange extract. Or you could do chocolate chip shortbread, and I would add a half a cup of mini chocolate chips to the dough.
Remember you could find the full printable recipe along with all the variations and tips that I mentioned on the show notes page. And to get to it, click on the link provided in whatever podcast app you’re listening on, or you could go to my recipe website, which is mamagourmand.Com and click on the podcast tab.
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