With its richness and melt-in-your-mouth texture, shortbread is as easy to love as it is to make.
Yet, we recently found a way to pump up its appeal even more: browned butter. In such a simple recipe, the nuttiness of the butter shines in every last delicate crumb.
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The only catch? You have to melt butter to brown it, but traditional shortbread relies on chilled butter that’s creamed with sugar.
Chilled butter is key in shortbread because it forms tiny pockets of solid fat throughout the dough, which separate the layers of gluten and give the shortbread its signature flaky, delicate texture. When I tried using melted browned butter straight from the stovetop, the fat incorporated evenly throughout the dough instead, coating all the flour. The result was cookies that tasted great but were also crumbly, dense, and greasy.
So, after swirling the butter in a skillet over medium heat until the milk solids turned chocolaty brown, I took the time to chill it until it was opaque and cool. Beating that butter into the sugar resulted in a dough that baked up much lighter.
While the butterscotch-y flavor of the browned butter was apparent in this batch, I wondered if I could dial it up even more by adding a complementary ingredient.
Milk powder (dehydrated milk) contains concentrated dairy flavor, so I tried adding some to the dough, along with just a little water to counteract the added dryness of the powder.
Sure enough, the powder acted like a volume knob for the browned butter’s flavor—and the added sugars and proteins encouraged more Maillardization, giving the cookies a beautiful tawny hue.
Double-Cut for Tidy Cookies
Before baking, slice the dough into rectangles. As the dough expands during baking, the cuts become score marks that make the shortbread easy to cut into individual cookies once it’s baked and hard.
To shape the cookies and ensure sharp, attractive edges, I used a double-cut method common with shortbread: I rolled the dough into a square between two sheets of parchment and then cut it into a grid of rectangles.
I transferred the entire grid, still on the parchment, to a baking sheet and slid it into the oven. During baking, the cookies expanded, turning my cuts into score marks. After the bake, I cut along those marks to separate the cookies into tidy pieces with clean lines.
The finished cookies looked simple, but their toffee-like aroma revealed their complexity: Before I knew it, my colleagues had followed their noses to the tray and were nearly battling over the cookies, going back for seconds and stashing the leftovers away for later.
