Classic Shortbread
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Classic Shortbread
A Classic Shortbread with Stone Ground Flour by baker Kathryn Phelan, adapted from Forgotten Skills of Cooking by Darina Allen.
Shortbread cookies have very few ingredients, so it’s important to select products of high quality for their flavors to shine through. For this reason, they’re an ideal recipe to showcase the nuanced notes of stone-milled flours (and no better recipe than the Queen of Irish baking herself!) In this recipe, we use Milestone Mill’s All Purpose Flour, but feel free to experiment with your favorite Milestone Mill flour. This recipe is flexible and accommodating. Shortbread are also great to use as the cookies in a melted butter pie crust – if so, cook them on the darker side.
Ingredients
350 grams Milestone Mill All-Purpose flour
115 grams brown rice flour
100 grams light brown sugar
¼ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon sea salt
280 grams butter-cold and diced
1 tablespoon fine sugar (optional)
Supplies:
9×13 quarter sheet pan
Parchment paper
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Set a rack on the middle shelf.
- Lightly grease your baking pan and line bottom with parchment paper.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add in the cold, diced butter and toss to coat in flour mix.
- Cut in butter by hand or with a food processor until pea / lentil sized pieces.
- Pour into your prepared baking pan, pressing in to compact dough.
- Bake for 30 minutes until the edges turn light golden brown.
- While still hot, score cookies into your preferred sizes (I enjoy fingers of 1″x2″)
- Sprinkle with optional fine sugar and leave to cool.
- If you cut cookies when cool, they will crack.