I made empenadas one day (recipe coming soon) and thought to myself that the dough would work well for some savoury appetizer cookies. These can be a refreshing change from chips and peanuts when you have some people over for drinks, and it is rare enough that most people will be impressed by the effort. Go on, admit it. When you read "Sun-dried tomatoes and chorizo COOKIES" you went "Whaaa?!"
For the first attempt, I decided to go with sun-dried tomatoes and chorizo, because that is what I had in the fridge. Naturally, you can experiment with variations, and I am definitely going to be doing these more often with other ingredients. Mmmm ... bacon anyone?
This recipe will yield about 25-30 cookies, depending on how big you make them.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups of all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon of salt
- 125 grams butter
- 1/2 cup of grated parmesan
- 1 egg
- 3 tablespoons water
- 6-7 sun-dried tomatoes*
- About 1 cup of chopped dry chorizo*
Preparation Time: 45 minutes
Cooking time: 15 minutes
The amount of sun-dried tomatoes and chorizo is really variable, depending how strong you want your cookie. For my chorizo, I was using cured dried chorizo, so it did not have to be cooked. If you need to cook your chorizo first, make sure you let the chorizo sit on some paper towels to absorb all that oil, you want you chorizo to be as dry as possible.
Start by cutting up your chorizo into small pieces. Chorizo is notoriously difficult to get into small pieces due to its oils, at least get them into chocolate-chip-sized bits. Set them aside for later.
Next, chop up your sun-dried tomatoes. Again, there is so much oil (unless you have fresh sun-dried tomatoes) that you really want to drain them first. Again, set them aside while we start the dough.
The dough is really simple. Unlike pastry dough and pizza dough, we do not need to work this too much (yay!). If you are like me and working with dough scares you, rest assured that this is the easiest dough to make.
In a large bowl, mix your flour, salt and parmesan.
Add your butter, cut into small cubes, the egg, and the 3 tablespoons of water to the flour/salt/parmesan mixture.
Work the dough with your hands, mixing it all up until it gets ... well, dough-y.
Now add the sun-dried tomatoes and chorizo. I didn't add them earlier because I wanted the butter, flour, egg and water to mix well by themselves first. This way, if anything was a bit off, I could see it and correct the problem without the oils of the sun-dried tomatoes and chorizo confusing me.
Its time to get your hands dirty. Put away the spatula and with both your hands, work the sun-dried tomatoes and chorizo into the dough. Really get them in there, fold the dough over the filling and press it in, then fold it over again and continue. There will be pieces that fall out of the ball, just pick them up and work them back in. Be merciless. They are your prisoners, don't let anyone escape.
The oils will also seep into the dough and spread the flavours around, and you should end up with a ball of dough that looks like this:
Place it in a bowl, cover it with film and let it rest in the fridge for 30 mins. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 210 degrees Celsius (410 Fahrenheit).
After 30 mins are up, take your dough out of the fridge and roll it into small balls, then flatten and place on a cookie sheet.
After I was done with this recipe, I felt I should have made my cookies even thinner, otherwise they feel quite heavy. This is how thick I made mine ... so go thinner than this:
Finally, bake them in the oven for about 15 mins, or until they are nicely browned.
Et, voila! Serve to impress ...
*
Tip: Don't throw away your unused sun-dried tomatoes or chorizo, refer to our "
Let's not waste anything!" page, and check out few ideas on how to use them.
As with all the other recipes we put on this site, this is meant to be easy to follow. We are hobby chefs who love to cook, and we are always up for learning new techniques. If you know of anything in this recipe which can be done a different way, whether for increased ease of preparation or better taste, please add a comment below!
Whipped up by Shyamal Addanki
