I cut the legs off a tall bread :-p

Sorry I will go away now.

Shortbread is essentially a thick pastry dough-think piecurst -in have a high percentage of fat that prevents gluten formation so make the consistency of the pastry crumbly(short) The fat is called shortening because it shortens the consistency of the dough. I have always rubbed in the cold butter into the flour and sugar. I often use powdered sugar instead of granulated.

I do not melt the butter.

I don't melt the butter. But I don't make it as a rule. I find it pretty tasteless and heavy to be called a pastry. So many other better things one could make instead.

This Ina Garten, via Eli Zabar, recipe never fails me. I get raves.

PS I am a little more generous with the salt. And I use unbleached, but not turbinado, sugar.

I use Ina’s shortbread recipe. always comes out perfect and yummy.

Taking the butter out now. I even have silver dragées on hand :-)

I've made Ina's recipe many times and it's very good. I tend to use hers more for shortbread tart crusts due to the structure, but the cookies are good, too.

This is my go-to recipe for shortbread cookies. The texture is a little more like traditional shortbread to me, buttery with a more crumbly texture (the reason I prefer Ina's more for tart crusts). I make A LOT of these cookies throughout the year but especially during the holidays. I often double the recipe. I use salted butter for these as a flavor preference. Also, the dough is easy to handle and freezes great. These never disappoint.

Scottish Shortbread

Note: I prefer using a small cookie cutter for these, but any size you like is fine. The sprinkling of sugar on top after baking is optional.

2 cups flour
2 T. cornstarch
Pinch salt
1/2 cup plus 2 T. powdered sugar
2 sticks salted butter, room temp.
1/2 tsp. vanilla

First, remove 2 T. from the 2 cups of flour and replace with the 2 T. cornstarch. Mix salt with flour/cornstarch. Cream butter, sugar and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and mix until just blended. Form into ball and wrap in plastic. Chill for about 30 minutes to an hour.

Preheat oven to 325.

Roll dough out on lightly floured surface to about 3/8- to 1/2-inch thickness. Cut out shapes with 1 1/2 to 3 inch cookie cutter. Place on parchment lined cookie sheet and bake about 20-25 minutes. Watch carefully, you want them to just barely get color (depending on your oven, you may need a little less or more time). Remove from oven, sprinkle with fine or granulated sugar, let sit for about 10 minutes, and remove to rack to cool.

ETA - Just wanted to say I added the vanilla to my recipe. The original recipe I started using in the late 70's did not include it. Much better with it IMO.

I've never made shortbread, but I have watched others make it, and I've watched Max Miller's YouTube channel - I subscribe to it. He's fun to watch 😃

I don't recall seeing a shortbread episode, is it an old one or a new one? For those who don't know, he makes historical recipes and also gives a history lesson related to the dish - he also does 'Drinking History' for alcoholic drinks from history.

The closest thing I make to shortbread is my Uncle Barney's butter spritz, and the butter isn't melted for that either.

I feel like I've seen some recipes for browned butter shortbread, for which you'd have to melt the butter, I'm guessing...

I've done both -- the best is essentially same as Zalco's (Ina Garten's) above. But I also like Butter Pecan Shortbread, which uses melted butter:

2 sticks (1/2 lb) unsalted butter, melted

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp almond extract (or vanilla, or use both)

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 cup oat flour

5 Tbsp cornstarch

1 1/4 cup pecans, rough chopped, some left whole

Set the oven to 350F. Lightly spray a 9x9 square baking dish, or line with parchment paper (see note below).

Whisk the melted butter with the sugar in a large mixing bowl. Make sure to work out any lumps in the sugar. Blend in the extract, and then stir in the flours, cornstarch, and nuts. Stir just until everything is combined and the nuts are evenly distributed. Don't over mix the dough. Pat the dough into the pan with your hands, spreading it evenly. If you like you can sink a few extra pecan halves into the top of the dough for a pretty look.

Bake for about 25 minutes. The top will still look pale, but the dough will be just beginning to turn golden around the edges. Cool on a rack for about 15 minutes before cutting into squares.

notes: If you’d like to remove the shortbread for neater cutting, line your pan with parchment, leaving the ends long on two sides so you can lift it out of the pan after it has cooled. Don’t try to lift it out while it is still warm, the shortbread may crack.

I've always made it with cold butter, similar to making shortcrust pastry. Cold right from the fridge. I work it into the flour and sugar, manually, until it forms a kind of crumbly mix that sticks together under a little pressure. I think you could probably use a food processor to work it into crumbles, but I've always used my (freshly washed) hands.

"I feel like I've seen some recipes for browned butter shortbread, for which you'd have to melt the butter, I'm guessing..."

Carol, yes, you would have to melt and brown the butter. Somewhere I have a recipe for Browned Butter Cookies that are good. They're not shortbread since they contain egg but are pretty darn tasty. The only problem is I found the dough kind of a PITA to handle.

Like shortbread, spritz are also buttery and good. They both have a short list of ingredients, but the egg in spritz produces a different texture. I'm always happy to see a plate or spritz or shorbread. :-)

Chloe, I can never resist one of your recipes. I will try this tonight. Thank you.

PS I can use Ina's recipe as a tart base?

Zalco, yes, you can use Ina's recipe for tart crusts. Her shortbread recipe is a bit sturdier than mine so I prefer it for tarts. You can look online for her shortbread cookie and shortbread tart crusts and see they're pretty much the same, if not identical.

I hope you like my shortbread cookies. As I posted, they're just a bit different in texture being more like traditional shortbread. The cornstarch factors in with that. See what you think. Thanks for your nice words!

One more thing, the flour and cornstarch in my recipe is bascially the same as cake flour. If you have cake flour you can just use 2 cups of that. No need to fiddle with removing flour and replacing with cornstarch.

carolb it was an episode he had last December 28 called "Hogmanay Shortbread from 1779". I attempted to link but was unable. You may be aware that he is or recently was in Scotland. He posted recently a picture of the recipe that was hanging on the wall somewhere in his trips.

My recipe calls for the same ingredients as chloebuds' in slightly different amounts.

Found it 🙂

I remember it now - a 250 year old recipe, sugar optional, and it has yeast in it too...

Here is my recipe and it is fast, easy and wonderful. From the net, years ago.

No melting, no salt free butter and can even be made with Imperial Margarine for non-dairy folks.

Scottish Shortbread

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: March 9, 2010

Americanized, motorized and essentially doubled:

1-1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup rice flour (found in most supermarkets and/or Asian Markets)

8 ounces butter

1/2 cup sugar

Combine all ingredients in the bowl of a standing mixer, paddle until the dough clumps together, press in to 1 or 2 cake pans (I like 1 for thicker shortbread, Stepahnie uses 2 8-inch pans). Prick with a fork to decorate if you wish. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 25 to 35 minutes, or until cooked through and lightly browned. Cut into appropriate sized pieces while it’s still warm, and allow to cool completely before remove it from the pans.

I only make shortbread in redcurrant season. I use this old recipe. It works every time and is very short and crumbly.

I open a tin of Walker's. (Just bought a new tin at Costco a few weeks ago -- earliest I've seem them prior to Christmas.)

The only recipe I use

Chloe, thank you, the cookies turned out perfectly. The ones on the top row have a little more color than the ones on the bottom.

PS The recipe made 28 proper cookies and 10 twigs (the extra bits of dough rolled and pressed into cylinders.)

I do not make rolled and cut shortbread cookies. I use this recipe which scores the dough before cooking and then cuts on the scored lines when it comes out of the oven. And I don’t dip them in chocolate. I’m a shortbread purist.

There are some odd comments in the instructions. It is because this is the transcript of a video that is no longer available.

3-Ingredient Shortbread Cookie Recipe

• Prep Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
• Cook Time: 45 minutes
• Total Time: 2 hours
• Yield: 35-40 cookies 1x

• 1 cup salted butter (225g) (if you use unsalted butter, add in 1 teaspoon salt.)
• 1 cup confectioners’ sugar (125g)
• 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (340g)
• Melted chocolate to deco, optional

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Sift 2 ¾ cups of all-purpose flour and set aside.
2. Add 1 cup of softened salted butter into a large mixing bowl and whisk to make butter pomade. If you don’t have salted butter (demi-sel), use unsalted butter and 1 teaspoon of salt.*
3. And sift in 1 cup of confectioners’ sugar and cream until fluffy and homogeneously combined. Today I am making shortbread without mixer. It’s perfectly okay to make shortbread only with hands.
4. Add in sifted flour all at once and fold to combine. When the mixture looks like sands, transfer to a clean working surface and knead just once. Knead as little as possible to make tender shortbread. Then form a ball and flatten a little. Chill in the refrigerator for one hour to relax the flour in the dough.
5. Now on a cookie pan roll the dough until ½ inch thick. Then cut the dough with a pastry scraper. Today I am making traditional Walkers rectangular (shaped) cookies but you can cut in wedges if you want all the cookies to be in the same shape. And pierce with a fork, which will prevent bubbling and help cookies bake evenly. Bake at 300 degrees F. (150 C.) for about 45 minutes, or until light golden brown.
6. Just out of oven cut the cookies again and let completely cool on the pan.

https://eugeniekitchen.com/shortbread/

Floral, that looks stunning. No red currants here :-(

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK, approximately how thick is your shortbread? It looks quite thick to me, but I can’t tell if it is a optical illusion or if it really is thick.

Zalco, those are perfect! I think I get about 2 dozen cookies from one recipe, so your 28 is close. So glad you tried them! 😃

A tip I once gave my niece: use cultured butter. There's a HUGE flavor difference.

It’s about 1/2 to 3/4” thick. The magic is in the contrast between the tart currants, the small amount of sweet icing and the crumbly shortbread. It’s one of those recipes which seems simple

If you eat Walker's shortbreads and have a World Market near you they have them year round normally in various shapes. Has been a while since I have gone to the one I liked, different stores have different products, but they also carried various other foods from Britain and other parts of the world.

But is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Sorry about the split post. Houzz is playing up on iPad.

Something I’ve done with my shortbread dough is press it into decorative molds for baking. Years ago I bought several molds like this from a company called Brown Bag Cookie Molds. All kinds of different designs.