Taking the pistachio

We're going up to Glasgow for the long weekend – a five hour train trek instead of the usual fifty minute hop by plane, a choice informed by fear the Icelandic volcano might belch again – and I figured a batch of biscuits might help the journey pass more quickly.

One problem with experimenting with cakes and puddings is that I usually end up with far more sweet stuff than the two of us can ever get round to eating (or worse, which we do eat, prompting emergency trips to the gym). For this reason I decided to make some Shortbread Pistachio biscuits from the Ottolenghi cook book, which like supermarket cookie dough is rolled into a long sausage so you can slice off the cookies you need and freeze the rest of the roll for future baking.

Ottolenghi on Upper Street is one of my absolute favourite restaurants in London. Sitting at the long communal table running down the middle of the room, the waiter brings plate after plate of deceptively simple dishes - saffron flavoured this, full and meaty that - to share and enthuse over with friends. Yet however wonderful the main courses may be, one eye is always on the front window where a mountain of cakes and puddings patiently waits. The Ottolenghi cook book is precisely the same - I nod and approve of the savoury offerings, but when it comes to cooking I turn straight to the last chapter to find the perfect cake recipe.

The basic dough is made by mixing 200g butter, 25g ground rice, 240g plain flour, 35g icing sugar and then a pinch of salt and the ground seeds of eight cardamom pods. This took longer than I imagined, the butter resolutely refusing to mix into the dry ingredients, and at times I thought it would never get there. However, eventually it all suddenly sprang together in the mixer, forming a tight smooth cookie dough.

The dough is then rolled into a long sausage about an inch or so wide, wrapped in clingfilm and refridgerated for a half hour to firm up, before being painted with a beaten egg, rolled in finely chopped pistachio nuts and then refridgerated for another half hour.



When you’re ready to eat, chop off however many biscuits you need, sprinkle with vanilla sugar and bake for twenty minutes at 150 degrees.

They came out brittle and crumby, the nuts nicely toasted and flavoursome. Still, there seemed to be something slightly missing. Shortbread is made by significantly increasing the volume of fats to wheat, so the butter coats the particles of flour and stops them from forming the glutenous proteins which would otherwise hold the biscuit together (you’ll note there is far more fat – or shortening – in these biscuits than in the Doris sponge I cooked last week). And here was the problem: the shortbread was so short that the biscuit fell apart into tight angular crumbs in my mouth. Not exactly the sort of comforting biscuit I'd been hoping for.

I think I’ll leave the rest of the biscuit dough in the freezer until June and serve them with a nice soothing gooseberry fool – something light and whipped to take the edge off the crumbs, and tart and fruity to bite through the fattiness – and consider making a proper biscuit laced with pistachios another day. Something crisp on the outside, chewy in the middle and studded with fabulous green nuts. Something the way a biscuit should be.