Olive Biscuit re-do

So over Christmas I found and tried a recipe for something called "Scourtins." Essentially "Olive Biscuits" except when you say things in French they sound much cooler and more appetizing.

The recipe was super easy and I made it between cookie batches, enjoying the savoury olfactory break from the unrelenting sweet onslaught. Seriously when you make as many cookies as I do at Christmas, you get an ADHD-quality sugar high by the end of the day. These biscuits do legitimately smell amazing. I mean, olives smell amazing. And salty olives smell amazing. And salty olives plus butter? Yeah, you get the idea.

I started making it and immediately realised that, like most recipe quantities, whenever they say "makes 34" they mean "makes 34 if you've been to Cordon Bleu, but otherwise makes 5." So I doubled it halfway through and sort of fumbled my way through the flour/olive oil addition process. The result was that they looked and tasted gorgeous, but only if you could get past the fact that they were essentially olive flavoured sand. The texture was, how best to put this, beyond off. Crumbly to the point of you just had to look at them and they would disintegrate before your eyes.

Mum, bless her, kept them in a nice little tupperware container in the cupboard, trying to make me feel better. But as the container was glass, all that did was serve as proof that the number of biscuits remained unchanged as the days went by. It was rather discouraging.

BUT never one to be deterred, and really wanting to eat olive biscuits, I decided to try, try, try again. If there's one legitimate justification for persistence in the face of adversity, it's the prospect of eating Scourtins at the other end.

"Black" Olives. What can I say.
I'm a philistine.

The recipe calls for Nyon olives. (full disclosure, I am not an olive connoisseur. I know there are a million kinds and that they are all totally different but it goes over my head. Hey, nobody's perfect. I'm learning.) The first time I made them, we happened to be somewhere that sold Nyon olives. They were marinated in herbs and were black and tiny and holy CRAP they were delicious. I put what was left over from the recipe in a bowl and put the bowl in the library before dinner. Five minutes later Mum came into the kitchen carrying the bowl and said "Take these away from me right now. Hide them in the fridge and never tell me where they are." When I got olives over the weekend (see Gauntlet Pasta, below) they didn't have Nyons but I decided to play fast and loose with my olive selection and got what I will say are "black olives." Not Kalamata. I know that much. But beyond that, sorry if I'm offending anyone. Black olives.

If you can't deal with me anymore then stop reading. Otherwise, recipe, ho!


SCOURTINS (Olive Biscuits)

Doubled and adapted from the one at Epicurious.com.

INGREDIENTS

2 sticks plus 2 tbs unsalted butter, softened

1/4 cup confectioner's sugar, sifted

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup cured olives, preferably from Nyons (this is true but I used black olives), pitted and coarsely chopped

 Sea salt

 

Cream butter and confectioner's sugar in a mixer. Add the olive oil. Add the flour in two bits, blending after each one. Add the olives and either stir by hand or use the mixer. I did both, incidentally. The dough will be very sticky.

 

This is where the instructions get weird, so for you, dear reader, I have moved them around a bit to accommodate normal human behavior, standard kitchen equipment, and the progression of time as a linear notion.

 

 

Cute little dough heads peeking out of wax paper rolls.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On a pastry mat, work the dough for a few minutes, making sure the olives are well incorporated. Form the dough into a log about an inch in diameter, wrap in wax paper, and refrigerate at least 1/2 an hour.

 

 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice chilled dough into 1/4 thick rounds and place on parchment lined baking sheets. You can squeeze them pretty close together they don't spread. Sprinkle with sea salt. Bake for about 15 minutes until the edges are golden. Remove from oven and cool on wire racks.

BEETLE NOTES

 

You will be able to see, if you look, the differences between my recipe at the one at epicurious. For starters. 1 1/2 cups of confectioner's sugar is a hell of a lot of sugar. That just seemed ridiculous. I thought about keeping that measurement as a single portion, but even 3/4 seemed excessive. So I added 1/4 cup and hoped for the best. Guys, don't get me wrong, I TOTALLY GET the sweet/salty thing. That is the greatest combination ever.(I used to put m&ms into my salted movie theatre popcorn. Hello?)  But 1 1/2 cups just seemed like it would push it over the salty/sweet deliciousness threshold into the realm of "this is actually a cookie with olives in it which is a fundamentally flawed concept." So 1/4, I'm hoping, gives it that touch of sweetness without overpowering the olives, which is kind of the point. I also added two more tablespoons of butter because when I stopped at 2 sticks the dough wasn't coming together. More butter people, more butter!



Butterrrrrrrrrrr

The rolling directions are insane. I seriously read them ten times trying to figure out which step came first. From what I gather, the person writing this recipe assumes that everyone who makes these has an industrial sized refrigerator that has enough room to store, for a significant period of time, a entire pastry mat, flattened out.

 

To which I raise a manicured eyebrow and say OH REALLY?!?!?!

 

Because. What the hell?

 

First. Almost nobody has a fridge that size. (If only we were all that lucky.) Second. Even if I DID have a fridge that size, it would be full of, I don't know, FOOD? Maybe? Space in a refrigerator is always at a premium. That's why there are bazillions of advice columns for fridge organisation and storage. It's a BIG problem for 99% of the population. Organising your fridge is like playing Tetris. Except that it's a game of Tetris you can only play for three minutes at a time because you can't leave the door open because everything will go bad. You rip open the door, frantically try to slot things in, look for those pieces that have the sticky out bits, identify the big bulky ones, slam the door shut again, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Until you either give up and eat whatever you can't fit in, or all your food spoils, and game over you're dead.

 

The concept that I would be able to roll out a pastry mat sized piece of dough and then just POP it in my fridge without first removing everything, including half the shelving, is preposterous. And vaguely condescending.

 

THEREFORE I decided to indicate (above) to work the dough a little with your hands, then roll it into a log in wax paper, THEN put it in your fridge. Where it becomes that AMAZING Tetris piece that's one column that fits everywhere and always gets you a complete line. So much easier.

The dough log Tetris equivalent of the magic long piece.

 

Pre-cooking

If the dough is in a log, also, you don't have to cut it out into rounds. Which isn't inherently difficult it's just time consuming, and assumes that you have the required counter space. Which, if you live in New York, you obviously don't, and if you have a standard sized kitchen you probably don't either. Cutting off the 1/4 slices is just . . . so . . . easy. And once the dough is chilled it cuts like a dream.
 

 

Basically I'm just facilitating your access to salty olive goodness. I know I know. I love you too.

 

 

Don't be afraid to leave the Scourtins in for more than 15 minutes either. This time, even though my slices were (for the most part) 1/4 inch thick, at 15 minutes they weren't golden brown, or brown at all. I ended up leaving them in for almost 10 minutes more. Your oven may be different. Just saying, don't automatically pull them out at 15, they could totally need to go a bit longer.

 

Also, don't worry that the French police will come find you because you didn't use the right olives. I guarantee you that these will be fine even though I'm sure I used what I'm sure are VASTLY inferior olives.

 

As a matter of fact, perhaps that knocking at the front door is the gendarmerie right now.

 

Alors! Qu'est ce-que tu fait? C'est un cauchemar!

 

To which I reply, through a mouthful of biscuit,

 

Tant pis.