Heritage Cookies of the Old and the New World by Scott Pavelle

Author:Scott Pavelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Baking
Publisher: Mugen Press
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THOUGHTS ON CREATING YOUR OWN FLAKY COOKIES

Customize the Dough. The doughs are very consistent, so pick one as a model and tweak until it perfectly matches your taste. For example, we tend to use Cream Cheese Dough as our model but find that a full 8 oz of cream cheese makes for a cookie that’s a little too sour. So we replace a quarter or a third of the cream cheese with ricotta or whipped cream, and voila! Perfect. By contrast, if you are using a dough with more ricotta than cream cheese, it usually wants to have some citrus added to provide the acid that is missing. Lemon zest is the standard, but there is nothing to stop you from experimenting with lime, orange, or even grapefruit. You could even emphasize the point... a dough with the full zest of a large orange, or even two, could be really interesting with a Sweet Cheese Filling!

Or you could go even further out by substituting in other ways. How about a dough made with chèvre (fresh goat cheese)? That has a texture very similar to cream cheese, and is a classic pairing with figs... How would that work for a sweet appetizer? We have a wonderful recipe for Fig Filling that you could work from. Once could even add a bit of prosciutto to pair up with the figs, or use a sweet goat-cheese filling with chunks of fresh fig. Hmmm...

It’s true that some of these replacements can have more moisture than cream cheese but that doesn’t turn out to be a major problem. First, you can always drain away most of the extra moisture by letting the product drain in a piece of cheesecloth. And second, every one of the flaky cookie doughs is going to be too moist and sticky to roll out properly when it comes out of the fridge. That’s solved by judicious use of flour/powdered sugar on your board and pin. Regardless of where you start, the dough will end up absorbing the dry ingredients as it needs to hold together.

Customize the Filling. This is an area that offers more opportunity to make something unique. Take the classic formula that goes into Rugelach:

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