Beyond Burgers and Bratwurst

You all are probably groaning at the sight of the picture on the right. After one month all she could come up with was a post about butter? Well call me uncreative but yes. My defense: butter is probably one of the most important ingredients to most Western and even some non-Western cuisines (think India’s ghee, a very popular version of clarified butter). Although many Americans have been trained by our neurotic society to cringe when they read a recipe that states to sauté mushrooms in butter, Julia Child had the right idea when she said something like: if you don’t want to use butter, use cream. In other words, there’s nothing to replace the flavor of fats, and if you use them within reason they can do wonders to your food.

It’s around this time of year when people begin to think about cooking (if they manage not to think about it any other time of year). Thanksgiving is not too far off, and aside from finding the right turkey, you have to think: how much butter am I going to put into my mashed potatoes this year? Furthermore, with the arrival of Thanksgiving, the baking season is officially open. For me, this means I get to try out new recipes I’ve learned in pastry classes recently, such as Sable cookies. This translates to “Sand Cookies” from the French, and they are incredibly crumbly and scrumptious sugar cookies, perfect for a cup of tea or coffee on a cold afternoon (or accompanying a batch of other holiday cookies).

I digress. Back to the butter: One important thing to do when wanting to use butter is to buy the right kind. Each brand will be different. Butter is typically made up of 80% butterfat, 15% milk solids, and 5% water. Clarified butter is made when melting butter to separate out the milk solids and water, leaving pure butterfat. Many restaurants use this when cooking (which is one reason why eating out tastes so good!). There is one brand of butter, though, that is expensive but delicious called Plugrá Butter*, which has 82% butterfat. Apparently Cabbot has a higher water content, and one of my pastry chef instructors told me that she prefers Land o Lakes butter as a cheaper and more available alternative to Plugrá.

When buying butter to cook with, make sure to buy unsalted butter. This is vital, because every brand uses a different amount of salt and we consumers have no idea how much is in any of it. This can mess up salt measurements in both baking and cooking. Salt originally was put into butter as a preservative, and since the invention of refrigerators we can now eat butter faster than it goes rancid, making salted butter obsolete (except on toast). Butter can also be frozen indefinitely without sacrificing flavor or composition, which is great when butter goes on sale and you want to stock up. One tip: butter usually becomes expensive right around the holidays, so you can buy your butter in the summer when it’s cheap, and freeze it until winter when you want to bake warm cookies to stave off the cold.

This is precisely what I tried to do the other day when I was at the grocery store. I saw that Cabbot was on sale, and although I know it has a higher water content, I like the flavor of it. I read the tag: $1.88 unsalted butter. I looked: only three pounds left! I grabbed them, threw them in my basket, and rushed home to prepare dinner. Only as I was unpacking did I read the label on the butter closely: it was salted. Upon returning to the store the next day, the clerk informed me that due to the sale they had run out of unsalted butter. As she gave me a refund, she also asked me to fill out a form “So I can give you a rain check.” I got very excited. My first, very own rain check! I’d always heard that grocery stores hand them out, but I’d never experienced it myself. And now I have a precious rain check I can use in the next 60 days to buy my coveted unsalted butter.

* Plugrá Butter is available at Trader Joe’s and other specialty stores. Plugrá is apparently a play on the French words plus gras meaning “fattier.”

Sable Cookies
adapted from The French Cookie Book by Bruce Healy and Paul Bugat

4 ¾ ounces (or ½ cup plus 1 ½ tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
2 ounces confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp pure vanilla extract (or ½ a vanilla bean or any other extract you fancy)
6 ounces all-purpose flour (measured out by weight!)
1 egg, lightly beaten
¼ cup crystal sugar (this is sugar with larger crystals)

Put the butter on a clean counter and sift the confectioner’s sugar over it. Cream the two together by smearing it away from you with the heel of your hand, then scraping it back with a bench scraper. Once it’s smooth quickly add the vanilla so you don’t melt all the butter. Sift the flour over the dough and cut it with the bench scraper or tossing it with your fingertips until you it becomes crumbly. Finish mixing it by smearing it in small portions across the counter again with the heel of your hand. Form the dough in a ball and roll it into a cylinder about ten inches long. Cut this in half and form each half into 8” long cylinders. Refrigerate for two hours or overnight.*

Preheat your oven to 375F.

Brush each cylinder with egg wash and roll in crystal sugar. Cut the dough into ¼” thick slices with a sharp knife and place them carefully on cookie sheets (lined with parchment to prevent sticking and for easy cleanup). Press down on each cookie lightly with your thumb to make a small impression and so the cookies stick to the sheet (pressing too hard though will cause the cookie to crack, you don’t want this!).

Bake until bottoms and edges are browned but the centers are still pale. Depending on your oven this can be anywhere from 14 to 16 minutes. Remove the cookies from the sheet carefully and let cool on a cookie rack.

*Note: whenever the dough becomes too difficult to handle, this probably means the butter has become too warm. Stick it back in the fridge to solidify the butter, then take it back out and try again.