My Scottish Grandma's Famous Shortbread Recipe + Why I Flew to Florida For It!

This is me walking towards my grandma's house in Florida with a tin full of shortbread. This is her recipe, and at this point, I'm not entirely sure if she likes it, but before we see what she thinks, let me explain why this matters and how we got to this point. Shortbread is the only holiday cookie that I give a dang about, and that's mainly thanks to my very sweet, very short Scottish grandma, who every year at Christmas would come up to Chicago and make it for me and my entire family. If you haven't had it, Scottish-style shortbread is objectively great. It's super buttery and subtly sweet, and the texture is like nothing else. It's like firm and crumbly, but not dry, and just like it feels good in the teeth. So today, I'm going to show you guys how to make my Scottish grandma's famous holiday shortbread and an interesting variation that makes it a little bit more like a dessert. Then I'm going to bring it to her in Florida so that she can have shortbread on Christmas and that I can tell her that I love her. I'm coming for you, granny. To get started, I'm going to grab my stand mixer, and if you don't have one of these, that's not a big deal. I've got another option for you guys coming up in just a second. Into the bowl of this mixer goes 320 grams of all-purpose flour, 110 grams of sugar, 3 grams of salt, 220 grams of cold butter, or two whole sticks, and I've decided to grate this butter on the largest whole sides of my box grater because I feel like it speeds up the mixing process. If we just added in cubed butter here, the paddle would need at least three to four minutes to break that down before I actually start mixing things together. The last thing is going to be 110 grams of white rice flour. This is kind of like a secret ingredient. Since it has no gluten, it makes this shortbread very tender and slightly crumbly. Now, to mix this, the paddle attachment goes on, and I'm going to turn my mixer to low speed. Going with low speed at first like this is mainly about getting that butter broken down into the flour so that when I turn it up to medium speed in a second, the paddle doesn't just throw flour all over my counter. When the butter and flour are looking pebbly like this, I'm going to turn the mixer up to medium speed and continue to mix for 10 to 15 more minutes. Since there's no water in this dough but a ton of fat, like 68% by weight of flour actually, this dough is going to take a really long time to come together. It might not seem like much is changing from minute four to minute 10, but the flour is slowly hydrating and things are becoming more unified. If your dough is starting to ride up the bowl like this, make sure to stop and use a rubber spatula to push that down. There we go. At 12 minutes, you can see things are starting to come together a little bit more. At 15 minutes, the dough is fully clearing the bowl and looks like a finished product. The way I test to see if this dough is ready is to grip some into the palm of my hand and give it a good squeeze. It should have an almost playdough like consistency to it and should be pliable and soft but not wet in any way. I'll call that done. Like I said before, you can get to this exact same point by hand mixing, but it does take a little bit of elbow grease to get there. The process is essentially the exact same too. You add some dry things into a bowl with some butter and then you work it mechanically, but in this case you're using your forearms instead of a robot, until things come together and are a little bit pebbly like this. From there, I'm going to switch over to a squeeze and turn move and repeat that like four to five hundred times. It feels like a thousand times, but basically after 15 to 20 minutes, we've got the same shortbread playdough. Now, to shape this into shortbread, I'm going to grab a half sheet tray and line it with some parchment paper. From there, I'll drop my dough down and then using another sheet tray, in this case a small one, I'm going to press this dough down into a disc shape. This initial flattening saves a lot of awkward pushing and tearing of the dough. From there, I'm going to massage this round into a rough rectangle that's about nine inches tall by seven inches wide. I've also opted to not use a rolling pin here because it basically required a lot more flour being added to keep things from getting stuck and I wasn't happy with the powdery quality that it gave the shortbread. Plus, it made a huge mess. The sheet tray keeps things nice and contained. Once I have a rugged looking rectangle like this, I'm going to use my dough scraper to finesse this into a more perfect rectangle. I'll mention that the shortbread of my youth was not in any way perfectly square and that its squareness will have no impact on flavor. The recipe itself is pure perfection and if you just bake this in a slab like this and then cut it into rough squares, you would be very happy like I was as a kid. But I did want to show you guys how to make something special so here's my attempt. First, I'm going to perforate a line on the far side of this dough that's going to be for trimming off the edges after the bake. Next, I'm going to grab my ruler and then line it up with that first edge and then perforate the other side. From there, I'll mark four more ruler widths for five total vertical perforations. Then I'm going to perforate every two and a half inches from the top to the bottom. My goal here is to have picturesque little perfect rectangles that will look handmade but by someone who cares a lot. We'll see how successful I am at this in just a minute. The last step before I bake these is to score them all with a fork. I'm going to hit every rectangle six times because scoring helps the heat penetrate the shortbread while it's baking and makes it cook more evenly. But if you're feeling rustic, there's no need to be as perfect with the fork as I'm being here. Feel free to go crazy and mark randomly. That would be a lot more Scottish Granny of you for sure. Once this whole sheet is scored, I'm going to load it into a 275F, 135C oven and bake it for 45 minutes to an hour depending on your oven. 45 minutes later, I'm going to pull these out so that we can take a look. I know the shortbread's done when the top is well set up and not overly soft and there's just a little bit of golden brown around the edges. Now, I'm going to let this shortbread set for 10 minutes on the sheet tray, then I'll come back and cut it while it's still warm. 10 minutes later, I'm going to grab this shortbread parchment and that cracked it. Don't do that. Cut it on the sheet tray, you guys. Now, using a serrated knife, I'm going to cut this shortbread on the seams that I perforated earlier. I found personally that cutting this while it's still warm makes a pretty big difference in terms of cleanliness of the final cut. Once I've got all these cut, you can see that this shortbread looks great. The cuts are clean enough and the shape is properly rectangular. They look like a handmade version of something that you might get in a box. Oh, and I broke that last one and now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. Should I put it back together like it never happened? I clearly don't know, so I just set it down and ate a piece of shortbread instead of doing anything at all. Lastly, I'm going to move these over to a sheet tray on a wire rack to finish cooling and setting up. While those cool, let's make a chocolate chip shortbread cookie. The only difference between this dough and the first one is that I'm going to sub in half of the sugar or 55 grams of it with brown sugar, and then I'm going to add in three grams of vanilla extract. The chocolate will come in a second. For now, I'm going to add the paddle attachment on and mix this same as before for about 15 minutes or until the dough is clearing the bowl like this. From there, in goes 115 grams or four ounces of chopped dark chocolate. This is a 70% cacao chocolate bar, and to prep it for the cookies, I'm just rough chopping it into quarter inch size chunks. I am not going to be sifting out any of these shavings like I would for my normal chocolate chip. For this style of cookie, I want the chocolate to be a lot more homogenized with the dough. I'll mix in the chocolate with the paddle for about 25 to 30 more seconds, and once the chocolate is mixed in, I'm going to repeat the shaping step that I did same as before by pushing it into a perfect rectangle, scoring it with a ruler width, and then poking it with a fork. In they go to the oven for 45 to an hour at 275F, 135C. About 55 minutes later, this chocolate chip shortbread looks amazing, and I'm going to let it cool for about 10 minutes. Then, this time, I am going to cut it right on the sheet tray with a serrated knife. That way, I won't break my meticulously perforated rectangles. This chocolate chip shortbread, you guys, is a very low-labor version of the classic. There's no need to freeze the dough or cream the butter and sugar, which I love. Just like the regular shortbread, too, it's rich and buttery and not overly sweet. Now, to package these up for my grandma, I've got this nifty flannel-patterned cookie tin. I am pretty adamant that shortbread should be delivered in a tin, by the way, not Tupperware. There's no culinary reason for that, just pure nostalgia. I think buttery cookies should be in metal. Now, you can also see why I was pretty adamant about getting these rectangles in the first place. I can perfectly fit eight each in this little square. It's pretty satisfying. Now, for the most important part of this video, I decided the day before I shot this that I would take a tin of this shortbread down to Florida on a plane and give it to my grandma to see how I did. So, let's see what she thinks. Hey, man. Hey. How are you? Good morning. How are you? How are you doing? Give me a regular hug. That's good. I didn't want to hurt you, Jack. How are you doing? Good. I taped it. Oh! Good show. Which one is the best? The light one or the curly one? You tell me. You curly one. I don't know. Let's try it. I don't know. I think they're both cool. This is your recipe. They're pretty good. I brought two kinds. This one is like a little less hard-baked. This was four and a half. This one is like a little less hard-baked. This was 45 minutes, and then I baked some for an hour. The hour stuff's a little crunchier. I've got another crumb. Mm-hmm. Because this is like a little bit... Yes. Too soft. Nobody knows what he's doing. So in conclusion, my grandma and grandpa preferred the crispier shortbread. If you like it golden and crunchy like that, I would say cook it for longer. Either way, the recipe itself is amazing, and I really thank my grandma for sharing it with me so that I could share it with all of you guys. And also, a huge thanks to everybody who watches my videos. Your support allowed me the ability to make a last-minute plane trip to Florida and to bring my grandma some shortbread. So thanks again, happy holidays, and I'll see you guys in the next one.