Chocolate Fleur de Sel Shortbread
These are extraordinary cookies. Sablées to be precise. They are Dorie Greenspan's "Korova" cookies, which she adapted from famous French patissier Pierre Hermé. Bless them all.
Delicate and crumbly, these cookies have an intense cocoa flavor, are studded with bittersweet chocolate chunks and offer up the occasional hit of fleur de sel. If you doubt the combination, I insist you make them. If you were with me at "chocolate and fleur de sel in a cookie," then I suspect you are already in the kitchen making them and aren't even reading this.
In her description of the cookie, Dorie Greenspan goes on about how she doesn't like to bake these when she's alone, as she is worried she'll eat all the cookies by herself. Pish-posh, thought I. How ridiculous! How ridiculous was I, more like. You're lucky I have stopped eating long enough to type this entry. Now go. Make them. Please.
Cooking note: Greenspan suggest chunking up the bittersweet chocolate yourself into what she refers to as "bits." Chunking is hard work. Do not worry about creating even little bits. I went for big and little, and I think the cookies benefited from having the occasional intense bite of a large chunk of chocolate. Oh, and I usually use chocolate chips anyway, because I’ve been known to be lazy.
Chocolate Fleur de Sel Sablés
Yield: 3 dozen cookies. If you are feeding more than your family, double the recipe. Logs of dough can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for longer.
What You’ll Need:
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
11 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon fleur de sel (or 1/4 tsp fine sea salt)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into pieces
Sift the flour, cocoa and baking soda together in a medium-size bowl. Beat the butter on medium speed in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Beat until the butter is soft and creamy. Add both sugars, the salt and the vanilla extract and beat for another minute or two. Turn the mixer off and add the flour mixture. Turn the mixer to low and blend until the dry ingredients are just incorporated, remembering to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl occasionally. The mixture will look like a disastrous mess of crumbles. Do not fear, however: the less you work the dough, the more delicate the cookie will be. Add in the chocolate pieces and mix until just incorporated.
Dump the dough onto a clean work surface. The crumbles will tumble everywhere, but gather them up and squeeze them into a large ball. Divide the dough ball into four parts. Work with one ball at a time and shape it into a 1 1/2-inch log by rolling it and flattening it and rolling it into shape. It takes a little work, and while in the previous paragraph I warned you against overbeating the mixture, here you’ll have to be a little aggressive to make the log you wish. Roll the logs up into wax paper or parchment and store in the fridge for at least an hour (Or up to 3 days. You can also freeze these for instant warm cookies whenever you need them. Recipes always say for “whenever company drops by unexpectedly.” Perhaps it’s just me, but I find the cookies in the freezer are MY snack salvation. The guests can have the ice cream.)
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
Line two baking sheets with parchment. Slice the logs into 1/2-inch slices and place them one inch apart on the cookie sheet. If the cookies crumble or break, treat the dough like Play-Doh and smoosh it back into the shape you want. Dorie Greenspan insists you bake the cookies one pan at a time. I was scared not to, and the cookies came out perfectly, so I’m listening to Dorie. Anyway, bake the cookies for 12 minutes. Do not worry if they seem underbaked. They aren’t. Like I said, Dorie wouldn’t steer you wrong.
Let the cookies cool in the pan on a rack. Put the other sheet in the oven in the meantime. You know what to do from here.
Adapted from “Korova Cookies,” Paris Sweets, by Dorie Greenspan (Broadway Books, 2002).
