Sugar Cookies and Salt

[BakerAunt]

Last week, I baked a half recipe of my favorite sugar cookies, No Fail Sugar Cookies, from the Fancy Flours website:

http://www.fancyflours.com/product/no-fail-sugar-cookie-recipe/cookie-recipes

I got distracted, and before I knew it I had added 1 1/2 tsp. salt rather than 1/2 tsp. (My eye had gone to the 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder and transposed it.) I wiped off as much of the butter as I could. (I always add the salt to the butter and sugar before I cream them.), but it was still at least 1 1/4 tsp. salt. I went ahead and baked the cookies.

The taste was a revelation. While I think that there is a bit of saltiness that lingers, which is too much, the cookies actually taste better with additional salt. Next time I bake them, I plan to use 3/4 tsp. per half recipe and see if that gives the proper balance.

I remember on the Baking Circle that Cass contributed to a discussion about salt amounts in shortbread, that helped me realize that I was undersalting my shortbread. I do not recall if he had a specific set of proportions. In my shortbread, I increased the salt from 1/8 tsp. to 1/4 tsp for two sticks of butter. While the half recipe of sugar cookies I bake uses 2 sticks of butter, as does my shortbread, the sugar cookies use three cups of flour rather than two. Maybe the additional flour requires more salt? I often cook with less salt, and sometimes reduce it in bread, but I usually leave desserts alone. Increasing the salt would be a change for me.

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• This topic was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.

[rottiedogs]

I don't use a lot of salt either. I tend to reduce it in almost everything - dessert included. I'm curious as to why the increased salt resulted in a more flavorful cookie. I would have thought just the opposite.

[BakerAunt]

I was hoping Ratio, by Michael Buhlman, would have an answer, but in his chapter on cookies, he does not even include salt in the shortbread recipe and says if one uses a good quality butter, one does not need it. (I hear confess to using the unsalted butter sold by Walmart.) He does have a rolled sugar cookie recipe that is close to the Fancy Flour one, but his only uses 2 cups of flour rather than 3.

I found in Bakewise, by Shirley Corriher, that "a pinch of salt brings out sweetness" (p. 407), but the recipe above has more than a pinch of salt already. It must have something to do with the amount of flour in the recipe (and maybe the baking powder?).

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