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One Badass Cookie - French Butter Cookies

• by Nancy, March 07, 2009

This is my maternal grandmother, Rachel, circa 1960’s as you can tell from her “flip” and Nehru collar. She was one of the original Badass Cookies in my family. We called her Rae. She was a baker. I write that with a deep respect for her skill. Nowhere in her repertoire, however, was there a cooked egg yolk in a cookie dough, which I read recently in Cook’s Illustrated is the secret ingredient to achieving the coveted and fabulous sandy texture of French butter cookies, otherwise known as sablée (which means sandy in French by the way for those who are not fluent in the lingo. And that would include me, nu?) In all fairness, Rae didn’t bake any French cookies. We are Eastern European. Grandma taught us some Badass Rugelach and Babka (which I will get to in these Badass posts, promise!) but for sablée I had to go to pastry school in NYC, known at the time as Peter Kump’s but now known by its hip initials I.C.E. There I got my favorite recipe for sablée from the cookbook author and baker (again I write this word with a deep respect) Nick Malgieri who spearheaded Peter Kump’s back then. Those were good, but I still missed that particularly wonderful sandy mouthfeel of authentic French butter cookies, which I’d eaten in France as a teenager and like everyone else who has ever had them, never forgot. Could it be that Cook’s Illustrated had really and truly found the key to this incredible texture? I had to try it.

At first I thought, what a lot of trouble to go to for sandy texture. But Cook’s Illustrated’s recipe made the process quick and easy. First you put the eggs (I made two to have enough for another chocolate dough too) in your pot and cover them with an inch of water. Bring the water to a boil. Then take the pot off the heat, cover it and let it sit ten minutes. No time lost there. Meanwhile you can be measuring out your other ingredients.


When the ten minutes waiting time is up, you transfer the eggs with a slotted spoon to a bowl of ice water. There they sit for five more minutes. Then you peel them and grab out the yolks. Cooks says to discard the white but if you love egg whites as I do, just gobble it up. They’re really good for you.


Now here’s the only part that takes a minute or two extra but is super easy and well worth it. Push the yolk through a fine strainer.


And it works. I was in a kind of heaven crunching these. You will be too. Isn’t it wonderful to satisfy a craving you’ve had since you were a kid? Apparently I am slow on the uptake however as other bloggers, like Cookie Madness, have used this technique in cookie recipes galore including chocolate chip. Go on, try it. And if you do, let us know what you think.
Badass Cookie Tip of the Week: Double your sablée recipe and freeze half to use later as a fabulous French tart dough too.
You can substitute the cooked yolk in any sablée recipe, but here’s my favorite one with the hard cooked yolk included.This is adapted from Nick Malgieri’s incredible book, Nick Malgieri’s Perfect Pastry:
French Butter Cookies (sablée)
Makes approximately 3 dozen cookies.
1 stick butter, softened but not greasy
1/4 cup sugar
1 t. vanilla extract, optional
1 hard cooked yolk
1/4 t. salt
1 1/4 cups cake flour
1. Follow directions for cooking and prepping the egg yolk in the text and photos above and set aside. Cream the butter with the sugar. Add vanilla extract if using. Add yolk and mix well.
2. Add salt to flour and add dry ingredients all at once to the butter mixture. Combine gently. Do not over-mix. Gather dough into a ball, wrap in plastic, flatten into a disk and refrigerate until firm enough to roll, at least a half hour or more.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Roll dough out on a lightly floured surface until about 1/4 inch thick. Cut into shapes with cookie cutters or a glass. Place on parchment paper or nonstick pad covered or greased cookie sheets. Bake until golden brown, about 10 - 15 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. May be stored in an airtight container for up to ten days.


That’s my Papa Max, Rae’s hubby. Never forget to kiss the cook.

If you have a cookie recipe for Laura and Nancy that you think is pretty badass, send it to us and we’ll test it. If it’s badass enough, we’ll post it as a reader’s recipe and you’ll win a prize of Nancy’s book Walking on Walnuts .

see also: One Badass Cookie - Chocolate Chip Cookies

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