Eat-scapades

Salted Butter Break-Ups

Posted by Alana on

Cookbook Club – Holiday Year in Review

The December event seemed like the perfect time to look back on and appreciate all of the fantastic food the Cookbook Club explored over the past year, so rather than selecting a new cookbook we asked everyone to make a recipe from any of the books we’d used in 2018. Some people cooked favorites that they or others had made before, while others took this opportunity to try something different. Go to my Cookbook Club site to get a glimpse of our past year in eating. For now – my dish!

I decided that I wanted to take a shot at one of the recipes that had previously piqued my interest but that I hadn’t ended up making. There were quite a few of those in the past 11 months, but the more recent cookbooks had the advantage of being top of mind, so the Salted Butter Break-Ups from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table popped into my head and that’s what I went with.

I combined flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor, then dropped in pieces of cold butter.

Salted Butter Break-Ups flour sugar salt butter

I pulsed the food processor until the mixture looked like a course meal, then gradually added water until the dough almost formed a ball. I formed the dough into a square and wrapped in plastic wrap to chill for an hour.

Salted Butter Break-Ups chill dough

After chilling, I rolled the dough between two pieces of plastic wrap into a rough 5×11-inch rectangle, about 1/4 inch thick. I gave it an egg wash, then used the back of a fork to make a crosshatch pattern.

Salted Butter Break-Ups roll eggwash crosshatch

I baked at 350 degrees F for 40 minutes, until golden, crisp on the edges, but still a little springy in the middle.

Salted Butter Break-Ups bake

The fun thing about these cookies is the way you serve and eat them. You let people break off their own pieces, thus why they’re called “break-ups”. I broke them into some large chunks to help get people started on breaking off their own individual pieces.

Salted Butter Break-Ups

These Salted Butter Break-Ups were buttery, salty-sweet, and fun to eat. They looked good and welcoming to eat, but were also pretty easy to make. Good for when you need to whip something up for a party with ingredients you already have on hand.