Why chill shortbread dough

Can you put shortbread back in the oven? How long can you keep homemade shortbread? How do you keep shortbread crisp? How To Keep Cookies Crisp. Cool cookies completely before storing. How do you know when shortbread is done? What if my shortbread is too crumbly? Why is my shortbread chewy? What is the difference between shortbread and Scottish shortbread? Why is my shortbread spreading? What can go wrong with shortbread? How long do you bake cookies for at ? Why do you use rice flour in shortbread?

What is the difference between butter cookies and shortbread? Why did my shortbread cookies puff up? What is a frozen liquid shortbread? How do you cut shortbread without cracking it? Can you make shortbread with margarine instead of butter?

Can you freeze homemade shortbread? This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. J , explains all the reasons why we chill cookie dough before baking it. But what if you just can't wait? The high fat content of these cookie recipes means that the butter will melt as soon as the cookies hit the oven. If you chill the cookie dough well prior to baking them, it will take significantly longer for the butter in the cookies to melt and cause spread.

That delay in melting gives the heat of the oven a little extra time to bake and dry out the edges and surface of the cookies, firming them up and locking them in place. The cookies will be pretty close to the size they were when you slid that cookie sheet into the oven. Actually, it's not just the fat that contributes to spread, but also the moisture content.

Chilling cookie dough gives time for the flour to absorb some of the moisture in the cookie dough, resulting in a drier cookie dough. So, less moisture also leads to less spread. The alternative to chilling a cookie dough to prevent cookie spread is increasing the amount of dry ingredients the flour in your recipe or reducing the butter. Less butter per cookie means less buttery cookies. To achieve that texture, chilling cookie dough is a much better option than altering a recipe by adding more flour or reducing the butter in a recipe.

Chilling a cookie dough can also alter the flavour of your cookies. I encourage you to do the experiment yourself and test out different chill times. The caramel notes from the brown sugar will be more pronounced because the dough dries out as the flour absorbs moisture and the flavours concentrate.

Any type of rolled cookie that's cut out into neat shapes could definitely benefit from some chilling, not only to prevent spreading in the oven and distortion of the desired cookie shape , but also because chilling makes rolling a little easier. Even just an hour of chilling can make a huge difference to how easily the cookie dough rolls out.

Once the cookies are cut to the desired shapes, chill them again to firm up that butter and reduce the spread in the oven. Any longer and you risk the chance of freezer burn.

Freeze Dough — If you would prefer, you can freeze the unbaked shortbread dough if you don't want to bake it all at once.

Just make sure that you separate each layer with a greaseproof sheet or tin foil, so they don't stick to each other when they freeze.

Unlike Walkers shortbread cookies where the main ingredient is butter, Scottish cookies may contain vegetable shortening or a blend of butter and vegetable shortening. Therefore, the Scottish cookies have a distinctly different texture crisper, firmer and crunchier and flavor. Do you chill shortbread dough? Asked by: Dr. Edwin Heathcote Jr. When should you cut shortbread? What can go wrong with shortbread? How do you soften shortbread dough? Can you put shortbread back in the oven?

Can I leave shortbread dough in the fridge overnight? Does millionaires shortbread need to be kept in the fridge? How Long Will homemade shortbread keep? How long should you chill shortbread dough? Why is my shortbread spreading? How do you know when shortbread is done? Sandy as the Western Isles, and rich as an RBS board member, shortbread is without doubt the finest biscuit Britain has ever produced. Although, strictly speaking, thanks to the efforts of the Scottish Association of Master Bakers, it's not a common biscuit at all, but a "speciality item of flour confectionery" — for tax purposes, at least.

Even baked goods are canny with their pennies north of the border, it seems. All you really need to know about shortbread is in the name: according to Laura Mason and Catherine Brown's methodically researched encyclopedia The Taste of Britain , "short" has been used to describe a "friable, brittle, crumbling texture" since medieval times.

The first recipes called for "barm" the yeasty foam formed by fermentation along with butter and a "Peck of Flour", which sounds more like a modern shortcake, but by the 19th century the leavening agents had returned to their duties in brewing, and the shortbread had taken its current form — a sweet, crumbly biscuit. According to one Mistress Meg Dods aka Christian Isobel Johnstone writing in as she prepared a box to send south for Christmas, the buttery biscuit is a treat reserved for special occasions.

You don't get shortbread in a box of Family Circle the hopefully named "rich shortie" is no substitute , or nestling amongst the pink wafers at the blood donation centre — its natural habitat is Sunday china, and Christmas Eve.

Even the tartan pouches of Walkers beloved of refreshment trolleys have a certain posh thrill about them, particularly when dunked in railway tea. But, assuming you don't travel enough to get your fix, what's the best way to make shortbread at home?

According to the Orcadian folklorist and food writer F Marian McNeill , who published The Scots Kitchen in , classic shortbread contains just three ingredients, flour "dried and sieved" , butter " squeezed free of all water " and sugar "fine caster".

It all, she says, depends on the quality of this trio, 'careful blending … and careful firing'. Reading on, however, her shortbread turns out to contain rice flour of which more later , forcing me to fall back on the patron saint of inept cooks, Delia Smith, for my first recipe. In her Complete Cookery Course, she beats g butter until creamy, stirs in 50g caster sugar, and then sifts in g plain flour. The dough is rolled out to a 3mm thickness, cut into biscuits, and baked at C for half an hour.

The results remind me of the description of shortbread in the Oxford Companion to Food as essentially "a thick layer of rich, sweetened shortcrust pastry": crumbly and sweet, this would make an excellent accompaniment to some fruit and cream, but isn't rich or buttery enough to satisfy on its own.

Improbably exotic as it may sound in this context, ground rice available from the Asian or baking sections of large supermarkets, depending on the relative propensity of the local population to make phirni or shortbread — fine semolina also works if you can't find it has long been the secret of many a cook's deliciously sandy shortbread.

The recipe in the Leiths Baking Bible suggests a ratio of 55g ground rice to g plain flour, stirred into g softened butter and 55g caster sugar. The dough is then shaped and baked for 20 minutes at C — and it's absolutely delicious. There's a definite crunch when I bite into a piece, and the rice has made the crumb fabulously friable.