Name: Salted Vanilla Shortbread with Rosemary
Total time: 1 h 25 min
Ingredients: 3 cups (15 ounces) all-purpose flour; 2/3 cup (4⅔ ounces) superfine sugar; ½ teaspoon table salt; 20 tablespoons salted butter, softened; 1½ teaspoons fresh rosemary, minced; 2 vanilla beans, split lengthwise and seeds scraped; 1 teaspoon flaky sea salt

Why This Recipe Works

An extra pinch of salt and rosemary in the dough, along with flake salt sprinkled on top, add savoriness to a treat that would be equally at home on a cheeseboard as it would in a cookie spread. To further enhance the subtle savory flavor, we use salted butter rather than the unsalted kind. Superfine sugar (rather than granulated) dissolved more rapidly and evenly throughout the dough, providing more of shortbread’s signature melt-in-your-mouth texture. The complex array of flavors in vanilla beans brought even more dimension to the cookies, along with a slight pleasing crunch.

You can substitute 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract if preferred for the vanilla beans. We like using salted high-fat European-style butter for these shortbread cookies, but any salted butter will work. It's important your butter is fully softened before beginning the recipe or it will be hard to mix the dough in step 2. You can buy superfine sugar in most grocery stores, or simply process regular granulated sugar to superfine consistency in about 30 seconds in a food processor. This shortbread cookie hovers the line of salty. If you prefer a purely sweet shortbread, you can reduce the salt to ¼ teaspoon or use unsalted butter.

Instructions

Cook along with these step-by-step instructions

Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 300 degrees. Grease 13 by 9-inch baking pan. Make parchment paper sling by folding 1 long sheet of parchment 13 inches wide and laying across width of pan, with extra parchment hanging over edges of pan. Push parchment into corners and up sides of pan, smoothing parchment flush to pan. Grease parchment.

Whisk flour, sugar, and salt together in large bowl. Add the butter, rosemary, and vanilla seeds. Use your fingers to rub the butter and vanilla into flour mixture until it forms a crumbly, uniform dough. Crumble dough over bottom of prepared pan. Using bottom of dry measuring cup, press dough into even layer. Using fork, poke dough all over, about 20 times. Sprinkle flaky sea salt evenly over dough.

Bake until edges are just starting to brown and top is dry to the touch, 60 to 70 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking. Transfer pan to wire rack and immediately cut the hot shortbread into 3 lengthwise columns by 12 crosswise rows using paring knife or bench scraper.

Let shortbread cool completely before removing from the pan and separating along the cut lines to serve.