This weekend I made Breton shortbread with chocolate pearls. These are one of my favorite cookies to put out on the weekly menu offerings. I enjoy making them. There's something nice about rolling out the dough, chilling it, and then cutting nice cookie dough circles for baking. Of course, whenever one cuts shaped cookies, there is the inevitable pile of cookie dough scraps, leftover from between shapes that were cut.
Some cookie doughs can be re-rolled a second time without affecting the texture of the second batch that is cut from that re-roll. Sugar cookies come to mind, for example. But there are some like this week's Breton shortbread which I never re-roll. At one point back when I was first working with these, before they were even on the menu, I experiment with cutting squares so that I could align each cut cookie in such a way that there was minimal waste. But the baked result wasn't quite as nice as when they are round. It may seem a small thing, but when these cookies are baked there is difference between square and circle finished cookies that is easily noticed. With a circular cookie, there's the same distance from the edge to center all the way around. But not with a square cookie -- the corners to the center are slightly greater in distance than from the midpoint between the corners going to the center. That doesn't make a difference in every cookie. But with these cookies cooked as squares, they didn't have same texture from edge to center all the way through.
So ... what to do, what to do? Well, in the end I just decided to keep making them all as circles. And the scraps that are left over? I bake them separately and I end up with a whole bunch of asymmetrical cookies in odd shapes. But they are perfect for snacking on, for putting on top of ice cream, for dipping in chocolate, etc. I could even bag those cookie scraps and pass them out to friends and family. Some of them are more browned than others because the sizes are all different, but it somehow works, probably because these scraps are all smaller than the regular cookies.
As I have mentioned before in previous blog posts, I don't like to see things wasted when it comes to food. So I always look for ways to use up as much as possible when I'm cutting, chopping or slicing any food item.
As I write this, I've already prepared everyone's food for pickup this weekend. And later today I will be making a dish of potatoes au gratin with mushrooms. A nice warm food to have on a chilly winter day.
If you wanted to avoid the brown bits, could you roll the scraps into a log and chill and slice? That would give them a round shape that would cook more evenly. But the brown bits do sound nice for ice cream.
ReplyDeleteWell, the whole idea is to avoid handling the dough more than once. This dough wants to be rolled or shaped only once. After that one time, any further handling affects the texture of the dough and the finished cookie. So it's better to just cook the scraps without handling them a second time.
DeleteOic, I misunderstood that part.
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