Butter Cookies

November 15th, 2020

by Piet de Heer

History of cookies

A cookie is a thin, sweet, and usually small cake. By definition, a cookie can be any of a variety of hand-held, flour-sugar-fat-based sweet cakes, either crisp or soft. They are sometimes called biscuits. The name cookie is derived from the Dutch word “koekje”, which means "small cake".

The earliest cookie-style cakes are thought to have come about in 7^th-century Persia AD (now Iran). This was one of the first countries to cultivate sugar. Luxurious cakes and pastries in large and small versions were well-known in the Persian Empire. According to historians, sugar originated either in the lowlands of Bengal or elsewhere in South East Asia. The use of sugar spread to Persia and then to the eastern Mediterranean.

I learned the first professional basics about cookies when I was 8 years old. The master bakers that taught me explained: “when you want to bake cookies, use your baking time”.

Butter Cookies and history

These days, we reduce the baking time maximum – we believe that time is money. But to be honest, more time makes for more (better) taste and thus, more revenue! (on account of the better quality).

Different types of cookies

In general there are more than 1000 recipes of cookies. We can divide cookies in groups:

Butter cookies (Rolling – piping – flowing)
Biscuits
Almond cookies (Rolling and piping)
Soft cookies (American cookies)

In this blog I focus on butter cookies.

Butter cookies contain, in general: flour, sugar, butter and flavour.

Basic recipe: 3 parts flour, 2 parts butter and 1 part sugar. The combination of flavours depends on the region or country, most popular are: cinnamon, spice, nuts, chocolate, and vanilla/butter.

Recipes

	Rolling	Rolling with baking powder	Piping	Piping with baking powder	Flowing

Flour	1000 g	1000 g	1000 g	1000 g	1000 g
Butter	800 g	600 g	800 g	700 g	870 g
Powder sugar		-	250 g	225 g	870 g
Crystal sugar	700 g	400 g	250 g	225 g	-
Eggs	100 g		100 g	100 g	430 g
Salt	10 g	10 g	10 g	10 g	10 g
Baking powder	-	5 g	-	10 g

Ingredients

Flour:

The function of flour is to keep all ingredients together so that you can handle the cookies.

When you have ‘strong’ flour, you can use a smaller quantity, if ‘weak’ flour you must use more. The best choice in quality is strong flour, this makes it possible to reduce the flour by more than 20%. Less flour gives a richer taste, higher quality and higher price. Weak flour can require using up to 20% more flour, and more flour makes the taste poor, and the price lower.

Butter:

The function of butter in a cookie is to build the structure, butter is the ‘glue’ in the dough between the sugar and the flour, and it is responsible for the character, bite and taste in the baked cookies.

Butter can be replaced by margarine or fat or oil, when using fat and oil you need an emulsifier to bring all ingredients together. When experimenting with the melting point, you can create aerating of the dough, which results in a different type of cookie.

Sugar:

Sugar is responsible for the bite of the cookie. The granule size of the sugar can change the structure completely. Powder sugar gives a cookie a sandy character with a fine structure, whereas large-size sugar crystals give it a really hard and open structure. Brown sugar in combination with cinnamon gives a real special flavour, which is very popular in a lot of countries. You can also play with quantities of sugar and butter. If you keep the same total amount, you can change the crispiness, structure and taste with more or less the same look.

Example:

Butter	50%	40%	60%
Sugar	50%	60%	40%
Total	100%	100%	100%
Structure	normal	Harder	Softer

Baking powder:

For top-quality cookies, you don’t need baking powder. All recipes with baking powder contain less sugar and fat and are baked in a shorter time. The correct combination of baking powder can reduce the total amount of butter and sugar, with the same bite volume and structure of the cookies