Shortbread II

Tues 12 Dec 2006

At the risk of getting into trouble about the lack of both Australia and Newcastle posts I am going to write about the next adventure in shortbread comparison. As I've mentioned before, sheer laziness makes me love this biscuit. Now, last time I tried out a recipe which used polenta - a novel inclusion (after all, Larousse's version is just butter, sugar and flour), which made the shortbread a lovely colour, and added a certain savoury something. No one complained.

Now, I've moved on to a recipe contain ground rice. This recipe I found on the Undiscovered Scotland website, which claims to be 'the ultimate on line guide'.

As this is fast becoming an exercise, I am more interested in ingredients and quantities than process (other than cooking temperatures and times), so everything went into the Magimix, was blitzed up and was then pressed into my baking paper lined roasting dish (more mixture this time, and also ended up with thinner shortbread).

So, for recipe number 2 we have ... 200g of butter, 60g ground rice, 85g caster sugar and 175g of plain flour. I cooked at 150C for pretty much bang on 35 minutes.















At the risk of sounding a little like a very well known chef who is appearing on UK television in search of perfection, the proportions in the two recipes are VERY similar. In fact, the proportions of flour and sugar are the same while recipe number 2 has slightly more butter and less secondary grain product.

This is interesting because the comment at work was 'this is sweeter than the last lot'. In fact, the vote overwhelmingly went in favour of batch 2 at both home and at work.

Now - is this to do with the subtle proportion shift, cooking for less time (and producing a thinner biscuit), using ground rice instead of polenta - or making the two almost two weeks apart and no one really remembering?

I have to say that in recipe number 2 the higher porportion of butter is noticeable in both the taste and texture of the biscuit.

I'm tempted to stick with the second lot of proportions - I'm really enjoying the noticeably buttery, crumbly shortbread. And I am very tempted to mess with the 'fourth ingredient' - but will the next batch be with rice flour, with no fourth ingredient, or will it contain cumin? And will we all have to wait until next Christmas to find out?!

tagged with: shortbread, baking

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