Ina Garten-Inspired Shortbread

Compiled by Igor Kukolj, Editor. Nobody here has cooked this — how these are made.

Every biscuit recipe you have ever read starts by creaming butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Here, that instruction is the mistake.

Creaming beats air into the butter, and air is what makes a shortbread rise, puff slightly and eat like cake. Shortbread has no eggs and no raising agent precisely because it is not supposed to rise. Mix the butter and sugar only until they come together — thirty seconds, not five minutes — and keep the mixer on low.

Dense, sandy and short is the target. Light and fluffy is a different biscuit.

Swap some flour for cornflour

Replace about fifteen per cent of the plain flour with cornflour or rice flour. Neither forms gluten, so the crumb gets shorter and develops the fine sandy snap that separates good shortbread from a plain butter biscuit. This is the standard trick in Scottish bakeries and it almost never appears in home recipes.

Bake it pale, and low

Colour means the sugars have caramelised and the surface has hardened. Shortbread wants none of that: 150°C for 40 to 45 minutes, out when the edges are barely blond. It will feel soft. It firms as it cools, and a biscuit baked to golden brown is one you have to snap with both hands.

Why you prick it

The holes let steam escape. Without them the middle lifts into a dome, the edges stay put, and the slab cracks unevenly when you cut it. It is structural, not decorative.

Score hot, cut cold

Cut the lines while the shortbread is soft from the oven, then leave it alone. Try to lift the pieces out warm and they crumble; wait until it is completely cold and the scored lines snap cleanly.

Storing

Two weeks in an airtight tin, and it improves for the first two days. It freezes raw — press into the tin, freeze, and bake from frozen with an extra 10 minutes.