salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread

December 29, 2017

Can there be a cookie of the year? Sure, it’s possible that I spend too much time consuming food media, the takes, the Tweets, the Instagram Stories. But if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have seen Alison Roman’s Salted Butter and Chocolate Chunk Shortbread Cookies virtually everywhere, weakening my resistance to the point that I had to try them, and when I did, realizing that just in case you’d missed them on, like, Refinery 29 or Eater or in her incredible first cookbook, I had to tell you about them because they should not be missed.

Roman’s book, however, was not new to me. I was lucky enough to read it the moment it was ready and it instantly became a favorite. If you saw me on book tour asked me what cookbooks I was into this year, I guarantee it came out of my mouth first. Roman has done stints at Milk Bar and Bon Appetit and writes regularly for the New York Times Food and her recipes show: she knows how to make the food we really want to eat. She’s also a sharp writer; I love her love letter to boiled potatoes. There wasn’t a chance I was going to miss the Roasted Broccolini with Lemon and Crispy Parmesan, Caramelized Winter Squash with Toasted Coconut Gremolata, Cucumbers and Kohlrabi in Crunchy Chili Oil, her whole section of Knife and Fork Salads, not-the-usual fruit salads (i.e. all savory), her Whole Wheat Pasta with Brown-Buttered Mushrooms, Buckwheat and Egg Yolk, Baked Pasta with Artichokes, Greens and Too Much Cheese and do I have to stop here? I don’t want to stop here but I’m getting close to just copying and pasting the table of contents.

But the single dish I did not expect to make were these cookies and their full title — Salted Butter Salted Butter and Chocolate Chunk Shortbread, or Why Would I Make Another Chocolate Chip Cookie Ever Again? — might explain it. She says she’s always found chocolate chip cookies to be “deeply flawed” — “too sweet, too soft, or with too much chocolate.” She thinks “there’s a lot of room for improvement.” I am that scream emoji. I feel protective… of a cookie. Roman instead took all of her favorite parts of classic chocolate chip cookies to invent something else entirely. First, she uses lots of salted butter; she says that while she prefers unsalted butter in almost all baking, here, it’s deeper flavor and saltiness, add more complexity than just adding salt to unsalted butter. There’s just enough flour to hold it together, just enough brown sugar to suggest a chocolate chip cookie, and chunks of irregular chocolate pieces to “prevent chip congregation” (although, warmly, let me suggest that only a monster could hate such a thing). The dough is formed into a slice-and-bake log that you roll in crunchy sugar.

The first time I made them, I quick-chilled the log in the freezer and sliced a few off to bake them and thought they were good, very good, even. But a few days later I sliced and baked off the rest (though I think even a day would work) and baked it for one minute less and you guys need to come over right now and take them from me. We put them on a high shelf so we’d forget they existed and then I started editing photos of them and writing about them this afternoon and have since eaten two more. They’re buttery, so buttery, and a bit crunchy (my husband calls the edges that slip onto the pan “sugar frico”), and salted in that flavor-deepening way, not just an flecky afterthought, and they’re going to win at parties this weekend should they survive that long.