Margarita! Cookies! MARGARITA COOKIES!!! (Need I say more?)

Ok, so I do.  And I will.  Right now.

I have recently made the best cookies I have ever made.  Also, quite possibly the best cookies I have ever eaten.  If you love citrus, if you love tequila, if you love margaritas, if you adore just the tiniest hint of saltiness in your sweets, or any or all of the above, and you never thought their essence could be contained in a cookie – you’d be wrong.  It can.  It is.  And you need to try this.  They are crumbly, melt-in-your-mouth delicately textured and oh so aromatic!  The cookies are not overly sweet, but the sugar-and-salt crust adds just the needed edge of sweetness with the very light, not at all pungent salty fleck.

Yes, I know that’s a pretty astounding claim to make, not to mention prideful, but there it is.  These have, as of last weekend, become my favorite cookies to eat.  Move over lemon shortbread, and gooey triple-chocolate chocolate chunk cookies, these, these are the cookies which I place upon the throne and hand the holy scepter of cookie royalty to.

Erm.  Yes, they’re good enough to wax poetic about.  No, they aren’t actually my idea, though now I feel it should have been – I have come across these on a great foodie blog I read on a regular basis, namely Zoe’s Dare to Eat a Peach, the same place which has given me the foodgazmic cast-iron home pizza-making method.

Zoe’s blog is one of the few that I have stumbled over while randomly browsing wordpress “food” tags.  I cannot even remember what it was on her blog that attracted me – it may well have been that pizza post, but after reading a few posts on it, I ended up bookmarking and following it, because Zoe is not just a great amateur chef, but her writing is incredibly inviting, in the sense that it convinces you that yes, despite the fact that this (whatever this may be) sounds a bit new and strange, it is worth trying and really very accessible – many food bloggers try the “if I can do this, so can you!” ploy, but in Zoe’s case, she actually does convince you that you can.  And, with spectacular results to boot!  It also helps that the food she writes about is as good as these cookies.  Or the aforementioned pizza.

And it’s not just the food – as I’ve said, her writing is wonderful to read (Zoe, if you publish a cookbook, I’d buy it!), and that refers to the rants that are sprinkled in-between the recipes, which are well-written, to the point and poke the social conventions in the eye.  With a sharp twig, which is very needed and more than deserved.  So, before I get to the actual recipe, there are two things which need to be said:

In fact, I will say them in all caps too:

YOU SHOULD MAKE THESE COOKIES FOR YOUR NEW YEAR’S PARTY!

And

GO READ ZOE’S BLOG!

So, now that I’ve gotten the important bits out of the way, here’s my adaptation of Zoe’s recipe (in turn adapted from Smitten Kitchen, but with Zoe’s valuable notes about the dough which were a lot of use, at least to me).

Special equipment:

• A hand or stand mixer.
• Cling film (saran or plastic wrap).
• Baking parchment.

Ingredients:

• 230g unsalted butter, softened (room temperature)
• 70-75g confectioners’ sugar  (my scale only does 25g increments, so I erred on the side of excess and it worked fine)
• 1 egg yolk (large, free-range and organic if you can get it – eggs bought that way are notably better than not, unlike many other things where you can’t tell the difference)
• Small pinch of salt
• 1-1.5 tablespoons good tequila (mine was cold from -20°C freezer)
• 2-3 limes’ worth of zest (I used 2 and wished I had another one – so if your limes are small, use 3.  I will, next time.)
• Zest of 1 large orange.  Or 1.5 smaller ones.
• 5dl or just over 2 cups of all-purpose (plain) flour.

• Coating:
• 1 1/4 dl (1/2 cup) granulated or caster sugar (I only had caster but it works fine)
• 2 teaspoons flaked sea salt (if using regular non-flaked salt, use 1 teaspoon or less!)

What you do:

• Beat the butter with a mixer until it’s fluffy, add the sugar and beat until it’s incorporated and pale.
• Add yolk, zest of lime and orange, salt, and tequila.  Beat to incorporate.
• Add the flour and beat on low speed until it’s barely combined into crumbs.  Stop.
• Using a silicone spatula or your hands, carefully mash the crumbs into a ball of dough.  Warning!!!  The dough is incredibly smooth and buttery and will tend to want to melt into your hands and pretend to be hand lotion.  Don’t let it.  Handle it as little as possible.  In fact, I wrapped it in some plastic wrap and then mashed it together.
• Refrigerate the dough for about 10-15 minutes wrapped in plastic, then take out, and cut in half, placing halves on prepared pieces of plastic wrap.
• Shape each half into a rough log by wrapping it in the plastic, and rolling and mashing it out a bit.  Wrap and refrigerate another 30 minutes.
• Take the logs out of the fridge, and finish shaping them (they will be noticeably firmer).  I used a wooden cutting board on top of them and rolled them (still wrapped in plastic!) between the board and kitchen counter to get them to more or less even thickness.  You can make them as thick or thin as you like – mine were about 3.5cm across when I was done.  Note that cookies will expand a little bit when baked, and shape your log accordingly.
• Rewrap the logs tightly in the plastic wrap, twisting the ends to seal, and place in the refrigerator for 3-4 hours or overnight (I did the latter).
• When you are ready to bake, preheat oven to 180°C (350F) and place a piece of baking parchment on a cookie sheet.
• Mix coating ingredients together by putting it all in a mug and stirring vigorously with a fork.
• Place a piece of baking parchment on your counter (to avoid mess), and pour half of coating sugar/salt onto it.  Spread a little.
• Zoe recommended painting the logs with another egg yolk, but I found that unnecessary.  Unwrap one of your logs, and roll it around in the sugar, pressing down a bit, to coat well and thoroughly.
• Slice into 0.7-1cm thick slices, and place those on the baking sheet.  If any slices get coating on one cut side, place them that side up.  Repeat with the remaining coating and the other dough log.
• Bake for 12-17 minutes (depending on your oven and size of cookies).  Mine baked in about 16 minutes.  Take them out when the edges just barely, barely begin to turn golden.
• Cool on their sheet, and finish on a rack if you have one.  Store in an airtight container for as long as you manage to store them (apparently they are meant to keep for up to 5 days.  I suspect a week won’t do them much harm, but really, who in their right mind can manage to keep them around that long?!).

Certainly not us.  I baked them for a party last Saturday, and they are already gone.  All gone.  I feel the urge to go out and buy a few limes and an orange already, to repeat the divine experience – but I won’t.  I need to pace myself else I won’t fit into any pants after this holiday season.  But… soon.  Soon.

The salt regulation – “So quit eating junk”

This post has started as a reaction to a random question on the net regarding further reduction of salt in processed foods on top of the reductions which has already been made by the industry, and whether it is good, bad, and whether it is fair. Leaving aside the fairness question (it is not one I wish to tackle for the industry, I leave that to the finance people), and before I go any further, I would like to state that what I am about to say is in no way the opinion of the industry, but my personal views. Whatever they may coincide with professionally has no bearing on anything other than the fact that perhaps someone somewhere could agree with me, or alternatively twist my words into something they like, but I may not. So, this much for the disclaimer.

I agree, to a degree at least, that the average Westerner consumes too much salt, when measured in total over the average daily intakes of populations. Some countries do better than average than others, but the trend is there to see across the board. However call your attention to the words “average”. As the old saying goes, “there are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics”, and in my view, normalising a population’s salt intake does not, and should not start with trying to push the processed food industry into salt reductions to and past all limits. Not because I disagree with the idea that processed food should have less salt—I do, actually, but not at all because of the aforementioned “average” salt intake.

The reasons why I agree that salt limits should be imposed are mostly a foodie’s concern for quality: high salt levels in food (similar to high sugar levels, as it happens) tend to mask/compensate for lack of flavour due to inferior quality of the raw ingredients. Therefore, as the industry is forced to drop the salt levels, oftentimes the quality of the products has to go up simply to compensate for the inevitable loss of flavour. Do I applaud that? You bet. I might not indulge in processed foods to the degree this mysterious “average” person does, but I do, too, like the idea that I can buy a good high-quality ready-made chilled pizza for example, once in a while on a Friday night after a long and tiring week – and know that the lovely flavour of fresh mozzarella or whatever is on the product in question is just the raw materials, not something faked and boosted by things I’d rather not ingest.

But I digress, as usual. What I was trying to say is that while the salt level regulation in food, difficult for the industry as it is, is a good thing, it does not necessarily mean that it will have any sort of great impact on the average European’s salt intake. The reason for that is simple – let’s face it: people eat garbage, street food, junk, whatever you want to call it. Again, in some countries they do so less than in others (it really depends on the national food culture and the actual locality), but they do. French Fries (or as the Brits call them out of dislike for the idea of French, “chips”) are a high-selling street food all over the place, and I will not bother to go into details of pitfalls of eating junk here (it’s a separate and different discussion altogether). The point is, consumers do buy it and consumers do eat it. And no amount of regulations to the industry will change the fact that any consumer can pick up a jar of salt off the table and sprinkle his or her food liberally with it. Unless the preposterous measure of trying to regulate what people put on their food voluntarily is passed, it is the average consumer’s choice how much salt to consume.

Furthermore, on the subject of consumer choices vs. regulation of industry, while I personally believe that ultimately the choices of food fall on the consumer, professionally I know that many consumers are not educated enough to really tell what is good and not good for them, nor do many bother to read labels or care. I am not going to assign blame for this here and now, but it is so. Therefore, in addition to food quality improvements, I believe some degree of regulation of what goes into industrially produced food is a good thing in terms of setting some sort of standard and not selling anything which is outright deleterious to one’s health, especially when the products are targeted at children. (I shall also not digress into the soapbox issue of parental responsibility and feeding their young properly.)

However, any such regulation is a two-edged sword. Many food products are meant and are designed to be used in moderation, or even minimally – such as seasoning blends, cake icings, chocolate and a variety of treats and snacks. And in case of those, it is really up to the consumers themselves to realise (or for the governmental institutions to educate the society about the fact) that eating cake daily is not normal, that one should not eat “snacks” on a regular basis. You cannot make a boiled sugar candy less sugary, and you cannot make bagged salt and sugar (when sold as such) less salt or sugar than it is – and again, it is ultimately up to the consumers to know how much of each they are using when they cook and add those to their drinks at home.

To sum it up, that said, I do believe there is and will be a market for the premium, reduced salt, fat and sugar products – I merely do not believe in forcing all the products to be over-regulated (Salt-free brined products? Sugar-free meringue, anyone?), simply because even the health-conscious consumers may want to buy luxury, treat products for taste and texture (achieved best through addition of salt and sugar, the boogiemen of food industry) at times. I also think (at least in the UK) that so long as the chip shops and other fast food places make a good business selling unlabeled junk food to the public, stringently enforcing regulations about how much salt can go into something one would buy in a supermarket is, statistically, a bit of a moot point in terms of the health and salt consumption of that “average” person when they go out and eat something somewhat resembling food out of a Styrofoam box on a street corner.

So quit eating junk.