Mortadella Cookies | Claire Saffitz | Cookie Week | NYT Cooking

So this is what we're going for, for the look of our cookie. I do feel like this is maybe not what they meant when they were like, but make it a cookie. Happy holidays, everyone. I'm Claire Saffitz. I'm in the NYT Cooking Studio, and today I'm showing you my submission for cookie week. It is a mortadella cookie, but it's not how it sounds. It's actually strawberry almond flavored, but it looks like everyone's favorite deli meat. Is that a selling point? I think so, but it's super cute and really fun, and it gets made in the food processor. It's actually pretty quick. So the idea was to do something really playful, and I was kind of going down a rabbit hole of chocolate sausage, which is like a thing, and I was like, what if you did that with mortadella? But then I wanted to bake it because it's a cookie, and strawberry almond kind of came to me, and it uses freeze-dried strawberries, which are really like every baker's secret weapon because you can get fruit flavor in a recipe without adding a lot of moisture, and I just loved the idea of fruit in a cookie, and then I just loved how cute it was gonna look. So I'm gonna cut the nuts into two different sizes. So these are unroasted, like raw macadamia nuts, unsalted. They're not toasted because I want them to have that sort of more pale color, and then I have some just raw pistachios here because I want them to be as green as possible, and what ends up happening when you have a nut in a cookie is that often whatever's exposed in the oven will sort of toast a little bit, so I don't need to toast them ahead of time. The macadamia nuts are gonna be a little more coarse because I want those big pieces studded throughout, and then the pistachios will be a little bit finer, and one thing I do when I'm chopping nuts because inevitably what happens is you make some pieces that like turn to dust, and some stay really big, so I like to kind of give them a little toss on the cutting board and move the bigger pieces to one side, and these are just gonna be a little bit finer. If you can find really green ones, these are really beautiful, very, very bright green pistachios, but like any raw pistachios are fine. Okay, so I have my nuts that are chopped up, and I'm gonna kind of toss them together just to make them look as realistic as possible. I leave some of the really, really fine pieces on the cutting board, so I just kind of grab, like the big pieces kind of rise to the top, and so I just grab those off the cutting board, leaving behind any bits that are just super fine. So those are the nuts. I'm gonna set those aside, and then we are going to get out the food processor and start to put together the dough. The reason I like food processor cookie dough is because often for a cookie, or at least when I'm making cookies, you have to end up like grinding something, and then it's like what I really don't wanna do is use a food processor and then get out my mixer, so we just keep it all here in one place. I spent probably every single morning of high school eating special cake with red berries. Then I had to swear off of it for 10 years because I had too much, but I love freeze-dried strawberries. I just love how concentrated the flavor is. What's wonderful is you can add some concentrated fruit flavor without adding moisture or additional sugar, which is really nice, and then I'm gonna add a little salt and just a very, very small amount of baking powder, and then we're gonna grind this until the strawberries kind of basically disappear and I have a kind of nice, uniform pink color. You want as much of the strawberries to break down as possible. If you wanted to skip the sifting, you could, but I like doing it because it's gonna remove seeds and anything that just didn't get ground into the flour, and I'm sifting onto a piece of parchment paper because we're gonna save the parchment paper and use it to form our log of dough because, again, this is a slice-and-bake cookie. No need to wash the food processor. Now I'm gonna start to assemble the dough. This is a strawberry almond cookie, and it uses almond paste, which I actually think has become an item that's a lot easier to find these days in any grocery store, so I'm gonna start with a stick of butter, then four ounces of almond paste. You wanna just go ahead and make sure that your almond paste is nice and soft like this. It almost has like a modeling clay texture, so that's what you want. I tested the recipe with granulated, but I really like the texture better with confectioners. I just felt like it had a nice snappiness that I really liked. So the almond paste already has that kind of almond extract added, but I like to amp it up a little bit so that it balances out with the strawberry flavors. You can see it's nice and smooth and creamy, no lumps. That's the most important thing is you just don't want it to be lumpy. And this is what's great about a food processor is it just breaks everything down so quickly. So I'm gonna just turn it back on for another few seconds. So I have an egg white here. See how it like holds together? So I wanna just beat this a little bit to break up the egg white and make it a little bit more liquid because I'm gonna divide it. Okay, I knew I wanted to add egg to the recipe because egg is a great binder and it's gonna help like keep everything together, but I didn't wanna add a yolk because it was not gonna give me the color that I wanted. I'm gonna add a tablespoon of egg white to my food processor and then I'm gonna reserve the remaining egg white because we're gonna use this for brushing the laga dough and coating in sugar. So I'm just gonna process this again, incorporate the egg white. Now I'm gonna scrape down one more time. All right, and now I'm gonna add my dry ingredients back in all in one shot. And again, save your piece of parchment paper. We're gonna use that for assembling. So now I'm gonna process this again. The dough comes together so fast, it just takes like a minute or two. So see how it's starting to form a ball around the blade? That's how we know we're done. Right now, it's this really kind of bright coral pink. You can definitely add a drop or two of food coloring. If you wanna amp up the color, you definitely can, but I'm leaving this natural for today. I don't wanna add the nuts into the food processor because the blade is sharp and it would just break up all the nuts and ground them in even finer, and I don't wanna do that. So I'm gonna scrape this out. I wanna just knead this a couple times because it's not perfectly uniform. One thing I love about using almond paste in a cookie dough is that it keeps the dough like soft and supple, but not sticky. It's just really nice. So once I have it pretty uniform, I'm gonna pat it down. I will say that if you're working in a really hot kitchen, what might happen as the butter warms is it can get a little shiny. So if at this point it feels like it warmed up, throw it in the fridge for a couple minutes. All right, so now I'm gonna incorporate the nuts, sprinkle those on top, and now knead again. I wanna just work the nuts in and distribute them. And you can use the parchment paper to help you to kind of get everything incorporated. And again, you're not really gonna overwork it. Once it looks like everything is nice and distributed, we wanna work this into a log shape. The thing that I don't really wanna do is feel like stuck in the kitchen, like rolling out dough and punching out shapes. And then it's like, what do you do with the scraps? So I like slice and bake because there's no waste and you're not touching the dough a million times. Okay, so you can see I have it worked into this sort of like rough log. And if I see any larger pieces of nuts sticking out on the surface, I'm gonna push it in and like pinch around a little bit. And this is going to not only give you that look of like a slice of mortadella, but it's gonna make it easier to slice because sometimes if you hit a larger piece of nut on the outside, it catches your knife and it might break apart. So now we're gonna use the parchment paper to roll this into a really tight, even, uniform cylinder shape. You're gonna take your parchment paper, you're gonna take the far end and fold it down over the dough and then you're gonna grab your bench scraper and angle it almost horizontal, but angle down toward the surface and you are going to push toward the dough. Under pressure, it forces it into the cylinder shape and it's gonna elongate it a little bit. And what ends up happening is if you don't wrap it really, really tightly, you'll get sometimes like little air pockets in the center of the dough. And then when you go to slice it, not only do you have that gap, but it can also break apart. After doing that motion, it's nice and smooth and even. So now what we wanna do is I'm gonna roll this whole thing up into the parchment paper. The final step of forming this is to actually now wrap it in plastic. So you want a pretty big piece like this. Fold the plastic wrap over. And the idea now is that I have overhang of parchment and of the plastic. So I'm gonna grab the ends where I have the excess and squeeze and pinch. And now I'm going to start to twist in opposite directions. And this is going to, under pressure, just compress the dough even more. And I'm ready to put it in the fridge. And actually one thing I like to do because I'm really neurotic is I like to stand it up in the fridge so that it doesn't develop a flat surface. Does that make sense? Just like that. Now we are gonna do one quick step before slicing them and baking them. And that is coating them in some sanding sugar. So sanding sugar is a very sparkly kind of large crystal sugar. This is a great touch because the cookie itself is not super, super sweet. And so the sanding sugar adds a tiny bit more sweetness and a really, really satisfying crunch. Here's the dough. It's so nice and smooth and firm. I'm gonna take that remaining egg white. And you don't need a lot of it. I'm just gonna go all the way across the surface, all the way around. So you can see it's definitely a more vibrant pink than when it went into the fridge. And that's because it sort of hydrates as it sits and chills and so the color gets darker. And so you might be like, why would I add food coloring if it's already this very nice, intense pink? But what happens when you bake it is it does dull a little bit. So it's totally up to you. But now I'm gonna take my sanding sugar. This is just about a third of a cup. And I'm gonna sprinkle it across my cutting board. You could just do this on a clean work surface. And now we're just gonna roll it in the sugar. And I like to press pretty firmly because yes, the egg white is gonna help it adhere. But if you can really press it into the surface of the dough that works even better. And now we're almost ready to slice and bake. But I found that I got the best result if I froze the dough briefly, just for like 10 minutes or so. I'm not gonna freeze it solid. We're just gonna freeze it to the point where the dough gets very, very firm. And that's because the firmer the dough, the more easily your knife is gonna slide through the nuts and the dough at the same time. You just want these nice, clean, sharp slices. My oven is on 300. So 300 is kind of low for baking cookies, but it's because we want the cookie to set and kind of like dehydrate, but not get too brown because we want to keep that nice pink color. So time to slice. And make sure you're using a sharp knife. That always helps. And here we have our mortadella look. When I first made them, my husband was like, what is going on? Because I pulled this thing out of the fridge and it didn't have the sugar on it. And he was like so confused. Yes, I was like, it was weirdly close. So I like to just do one kind of smooth, even motion, like a single pass with the knife to slice and you get your nice cross section. And another thing I do when I cut, slice and bake cookies is I always rotate the dough a little bit as I cut to try to maintain the round shape. And it also helps you to make sure that you're slicing evenly at the same time. And these do not spread much. There's only a little bit of baking powder in the recipe. So you can space them pretty close together. And rather than going one by one, I like to just slice a bunch. It'd be funny if you made like a chocolate salami, you could really put out like a whole charcuterie platter that was actually just cookies. But also just like charcuterie platter and cookies. Sounds like a fun party. I wanna go to that party. And so now I'm gonna get these right into the oven for a little bit under 20 minutes. So 16 to 19 minutes. And you wanna bake them just until you start to see a hint of browning around the sides. Here are the baked cookies. You can see they didn't spread very much. They're pretty fragile at this point. So I'm gonna let them sit for a few minutes and rest on the baking sheets. And then I'll transfer them to a wire rack and let them fully cool. And then we'll taste them. So actually you can see when I turn the cookie over that it's just ever so slightly golden brown on the bottom. So that's what you want. It's just like a weird phenomenon of using freeze-dried fruit in baking that the color mutes a little bit and tones down. And now it really does have that mortadella look, which is great. I feel like this is a great one to add to the cookie roster because it's on the lower effort, higher yield side. And so then you can like also then put your time into something like a little bit more elaborate, like a Linzer cookie or another like sandwich cookie. And you still have this like really fun one to show. All right, so I'm gonna taste. The strawberry flavor is unexpectedly concentrated. And strawberry and almond go so well together. And I also just love how tender they are. It was the kind of thing where I kind of couldn't stop eating them at home. It's like so easy to just like keep pulling, keep taking a cookie off of a plate. I'm very excited to try all of the other cookies from Cookie Week. Am I gonna get to try them? Oh my God, really? Oh my God. Yes, I'm so excited. I'm also really hungry. Yes. Oh my gosh. So for this recipe and all the others from Cookie Week, you can go to MIT Cooking. Happy holidays. I think either way, if I saw something that was a cookie and it ended up being mortadella, I'd be like, oh, I'm psyched. But then if I saw something I thought was mortadella and it ended up being a cookie, I'd be like, awesome. So really can't go wrong. Also, what are these like? Is it coconut? That one's really yummy. I'm so excited.