Recipe: Maine Pine Shortbread Cookies

[ysabetwordsmith]

I created this recipe tonight. It's a riff on my basic shortbread recipe with different flavors. Very tasty and seasonal. If you're tired of the same old holiday cookies, consider this as an alternative.


"Maine Pine Shortbread Cookies"


Ingredients:
1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary
2 sticks butter (1/2 pound), melted
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon Maine Pine Itty Bitters from Vena's Fizz House
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour


Directions:

Preheat the oven to 325ºF.

Mince one tablespoon fresh rosemary. (If you can't get fresh, use 1 teaspoon chopped dried rosemary.) Pick the bunches of needles off the woody stem, hold them together, and mince with a knife or scissors.

Cut two sticks of butter into chunks, put them in a microwave-safe container, and microwave until melted. It takes about 1 1/2 minutes in mine. It's important to use liquid butter to wet the flour, or the dough won't hold together -- and if it doesn't form a good ball in the bowl, it won't hold together on the cookie sheet either.

In a bowl, combine the melted butter, 1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary
1/2 cup white sugar, 1/4 teaspoon sea salt, and 1 teaspoon Maine Pine Itty Bitters. Stir with a spoon or cream with a mixer until the mixture is smooth and fluffy.

Add the flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing carefully to avoid spilling it. The dough will be very wet and sticky, but at the end it should stick together well.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. If the paper won't stay put, put a little baking spray or butter on the tray to glue it down some.

Turn out the dough out onto the parchment-lined baking sheet. Use your hands or a rolling pin to press it into a square about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut the dough into small squares. I typically use a 4x4 grid to create 16 cookies, but if it spreads better then I may go 5x5. Carefully move the cookies a little bit apart so that air can circulate between them. The dough will not spread, so it doesn't need much space.

Put the baking sheet in the oven. Bake for about 25-30 minutes. When done, cookies should be firm to the touch and just beginning to turn golden at the corners. Do not overcook! If they're hard or brown, they will be overdone.

Cool the cookies on the baking sheet or a rack. Store in a sealed container. These freeze really well, like most shortbread.


Notes:

These cookies have a bright resinous flavor. If you prefer your savory shortbread with less sugar, you can make it that way, but you may need to tweak the consistency to compensate for that. They should come out tasting like a pine tree smells. This is a variation on the many rosemary cookies made for Yule or Christmas, often shaped with an evergreen cookie cutter.

Vena's Fizz House makes a wide variety of splendid bitters. The Itty Bitters are 10 milliliters, and the big bottle is 100 milliliters / 3.4 ounces. Maine Pine contains Alcohol, White Pine, Spruce Pine, Rosemary, Grapefruit Peel, Lemon Peel, Juniper, Wormwood, Angelica Root, Coriander, Gentian Root. It has a bright, sharp, foresty taste. I like to use bitters in baking as an alternative to plain old vanilla extract, creating more complex and diverse flavors.

I use Irish butter. Any grass-fed butter will have more flavor than commercial butter. Use what you like or can get.

Sea salt has a more complex flavor and much better trace minerals compared to table salt. You can also use any light mineral salt such as Himalayan pink.

If you like shortbread and/or resinous flavors, definitely give this recipe a try.

This is a fantastic shortbread recipe in general. It produces the best-behaved shortbread dough I have handled, and it comes out delicately crisp and delicious. You can omit the rosemary and pine elements to replace them with any other flavorings you like to use in shortbread.

Comments

[cornerofmadness]

I have never heard of those bitters. I'm intrigued. There's probably not enough grapefruit in that to worry about

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

There are 11 flavors of Itty Bitters. Ingredients appear with the big bottles. Browse the different flavors and you may find something you like better. They also have a Maine Pine syrup which is just pine needles, cane sugar, and water based on what I could find from other sites.

Bitters can be very interesting. Some of them have dozens of ingredients. They're old medicinals, really.

Re: Thoughts

[cornerofmadness]

thanks for the links. I have other bitters here because they are fun to experiment with. I just have to be careful of certain foods and herbal teas because they interfere with blood thinners.

[pronker]

This sounds excellent. I've got some Unicum and Gammel Dansk and wonder if these could sub for the Pine flavor.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

There are lots on the site, both from Vena's and from other sources. With that variety, some should be safe. Oh, and the blood orange syrup is amazing. I made shortbread with that too.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Sure. You can swap in pretty much any flavor you like -- shortbread is very versatile. Basically, if you have something like syrup or bitters, you can use that in place of vanilla extract or similar liquid flavoring. Then just choose a fresh or dry spice that complements it. Look on the labels that you have and that may give you ideas.

Re: Thoughts

[cornerofmadness]

now that sounds good

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

If you love oranges, definitely look it up:
https://www.liberandcompany.com/products/blood-orange-cordial

I used it with the zest and juice of one orange.

[acelightning73]

My usual table salt is a blend of sea salt with seaweed flakes - the seaweed brings the iodine content up to the level of "iodized" salt, and seaweed has a lot of umami flavor. I buy it from Maine Sea Vegetables. (Their order page doesn't work outside of everyday business hours, so do it in the daytime when you can phone them for help.) Specifically, I use the sea salt plus kelp and dulse blend. It's amazing on hot buttered popcorn! And they have cookbooks with seaweed recipes in them, some of which sound intriguing.

Re: Thoughts

[cornerofmadness]

thank you

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have put the seaweed salt on my wishlist.

Re: Thank you!

[acelightning73]

Seaweed is so interesting, and it's so good for you! I love Japanese seaweed salad. And I found that using the seaweed salt for my table salt was an easy way to get more nutrients into my food. A sprinkling of it on some plain steamed rice was ambrosial. And my father and his brother grew up in Maine,and are familiar with seaweed as a food. My dad liked to chew on dulse leaves - very salty, but interesting. And I've heard that if you fry dulse leaves, they taste like bacon, but I've never tried it.

[pronker]

I share your fondness for seaweed salad and when one Japanese restaurant stopped serving it, along with miso soup, I gladly switched to one that did. How interesting about dulse leaves1

Re: Thoughts

[pronker]

Today was the day to bake these cookies - I halved the recipe, kept the butter at 1.5 cubes and used Unicum to flavor as well as the minced juniper, used half portions each of white and dark brown sugar, all other ingredients the same, scrumptious!

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Woohoo! I'm so happy it worked for you!

Seriously, I love my base recipe for shortbread because it is just so flexible. It's like the dance partner who always makes you look good. :D

Re: Thoughts

[pronker]

Oh right, I also used a crinkly-edged rectangular cookie cutter and perfection occurred at 16 minutes' baking time.