Since I started working at home a few weeks ago, I've been distributing baked goods during the week by walking to the homes of friends and colleagues who live nearby and doing drop offs at their front doors. I've also started offering contactless pickup from a plastic bin on our front steps. My St. Patrick's Day Guinness Brownies were the first baked goods I distributed in this manner, and knowing that the brownies were so rich, I wanted to provide some variety by packaging them up with something very different. It turned out to be Melissa Clark's Pretzel Shortbread.
I had been seeing the shortbread recipe all over social media, and I also had a pound of pretzel salt on hand that I purchased to use for future batches of Shauna Sever's fantastic Big, Soft Pretezels. Something salty and savory seemed like it would offer a nice contrast to a fudgy brownie.
Like the Smitten Kitchen Pretzel Linzer cookies I love, this recipe includes ground pretzels as an ingredient. But it goes a step further, because it includes a baking soda bath before baking to give the shortbread the characteristic bitter pretzel flavor. The mixing method was a little odd. You mix toasted pretzel crumbs, flour, demerara sugar, salt, and very cold cubed butter until the mixture just holds together when you squeeze it. I ran my mixer for a loooong time, and while my dough did hold together when squeezed, it was otherwise just a pile of loose crumbs until I applied the pressure of the rolling pin. I decided to roll the dough to 1/4 of an inch instead of 3/8 of an inch specified in the recipe; I thought thicker cookies had a better chance of holding together. I cut my shortbread into 2-inch squares and got 42 cookies from a batch. I froze the sliced cookies on a baking sheet until they were completely firm.
After the cookies were frozen, I realized that I had accidentally skipped the step of poking holes all over the dough. I tried to poke holes in the frozen cookies with the tip of a chopstick, but it caused the dough to split. So I just crossed my fingers and went with undocked dough. I dipped each frozen cookie into a cooled solution of baking soda dissolved in boiling water, sprinkled on pretzel salt, and put the cookies in a very hot oven (475 degrees -- the hottest my oven will get) that I immediately turned down to 350 degrees.
My forgetting to poke holes in the dough seemed to have no ill effect on the finished product. I thought the cookies might puff up, but I ended up with nice, level, uniform cookies. And they were freaking delicious. This shortbread had the salty and slighty bitter flavor of a pretzel in the snack food aisle of the supermarket, but with the texture of a buttery shortbread. I found them quite addictive and I liked the shortbread way better than the brownies I packaged them with. My cookies looked absolutely nothing like the ones from Lost Bread Co. in Philadelphia that inspired Clark's recipe, but in my mind, they were absolutely perfect.
Recipe: "Pretzel Shortbread" by Melissa Clark, from The New York Times.
I had been seeing the shortbread recipe all over social media, and I also had a pound of pretzel salt on hand that I purchased to use for future batches of Shauna Sever's fantastic Big, Soft Pretezels. Something salty and savory seemed like it would offer a nice contrast to a fudgy brownie.
Like the Smitten Kitchen Pretzel Linzer cookies I love, this recipe includes ground pretzels as an ingredient. But it goes a step further, because it includes a baking soda bath before baking to give the shortbread the characteristic bitter pretzel flavor. The mixing method was a little odd. You mix toasted pretzel crumbs, flour, demerara sugar, salt, and very cold cubed butter until the mixture just holds together when you squeeze it. I ran my mixer for a loooong time, and while my dough did hold together when squeezed, it was otherwise just a pile of loose crumbs until I applied the pressure of the rolling pin. I decided to roll the dough to 1/4 of an inch instead of 3/8 of an inch specified in the recipe; I thought thicker cookies had a better chance of holding together. I cut my shortbread into 2-inch squares and got 42 cookies from a batch. I froze the sliced cookies on a baking sheet until they were completely firm.
My forgetting to poke holes in the dough seemed to have no ill effect on the finished product. I thought the cookies might puff up, but I ended up with nice, level, uniform cookies. And they were freaking delicious. This shortbread had the salty and slighty bitter flavor of a pretzel in the snack food aisle of the supermarket, but with the texture of a buttery shortbread. I found them quite addictive and I liked the shortbread way better than the brownies I packaged them with. My cookies looked absolutely nothing like the ones from Lost Bread Co. in Philadelphia that inspired Clark's recipe, but in my mind, they were absolutely perfect.
Recipe: "Pretzel Shortbread" by Melissa Clark, from The New York Times.
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