I might have been late to the baking-with-tahini bandwagon, but I'm still enjoying the ride! I actually keep tahini on hand now, so I decided to try a recipe for Tahini Shortbread Cookies that I saw in The New York Times.
These shortbreads are slice-and-bake cookies that require significant chilling time, so I made the dough a day in advance. You mix room temperature butter with powdered sugar and tahini; add flour and salt; knead the dough until smooth; and form it into a log. The recipe says to form a log one inch in diameter, but that seemed unreasonably small to me -- so my log was about two inches in diameter. I rolled the log in sesame seeds that I had toasted in a pan on the stove, wrapped the log in parchment paper, and left it in the refrigerator overnight.
The following day, I sliced thin cookies from the log, getting 36 cookies from one batch. The recipe says that the cookies should not be colored after baking, so my cookies were pale and looked a bit sallow.
I really liked the sesame flavor of these cookies, but the texture was a disappointment. They were very crumbly and delicate, to the point where they were difficult to transport without some breakage. I don't mind a sandy shortbread, but these cookies were overly fragile; I think it would have helped if I had cut them a little thicker. I wouldn't make these cookies again, but I'm going to keep making my way through the other tahini recipes on my to-bake list.
Recipe: "Tahini Shortbread Cookies," adapted from Soframiz by Ana Sortun and Maura Kilpatrick, from The New York Times.
Previous Posts:
These shortbreads are slice-and-bake cookies that require significant chilling time, so I made the dough a day in advance. You mix room temperature butter with powdered sugar and tahini; add flour and salt; knead the dough until smooth; and form it into a log. The recipe says to form a log one inch in diameter, but that seemed unreasonably small to me -- so my log was about two inches in diameter. I rolled the log in sesame seeds that I had toasted in a pan on the stove, wrapped the log in parchment paper, and left it in the refrigerator overnight.
I really liked the sesame flavor of these cookies, but the texture was a disappointment. They were very crumbly and delicate, to the point where they were difficult to transport without some breakage. I don't mind a sandy shortbread, but these cookies were overly fragile; I think it would have helped if I had cut them a little thicker. I wouldn't make these cookies again, but I'm going to keep making my way through the other tahini recipes on my to-bake list.
Recipe: "Tahini Shortbread Cookies," adapted from Soframiz by Ana Sortun and Maura Kilpatrick, from The New York Times.
Previous Posts:
- "Creamy and Dreamy: Tahini and Halva Brownies," September 9, 2019.
- "Have Tahini, Will Bake: Fig, Tahini, and Milk Chocolate Cookies," August 30, 2019.
- "Who Needs Butter to Bake Cookies?: New-Fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies with All Tahini and No Butter," July 21, 2019.
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