These are my favorite cookies to make. They are my go-to’s. I have yet to meet anyone who does not embrace this cookie. The draw of these lies in the simplicity. Not many ingredients, a few simple steps and you have the perfect, crunchy biscotti to dunk in coffee.
Few pro tips to share. You will need raw sesame seeds- good luck finding them at your local grocery store. I have found that besides Italian Import stores, a good spot to find these is either an Indian or Middle Eastern Grocery store. You can generally buy them in bulk and for a great price at those stores. If you really can’t find anything local to pick, have no fear, Amazon has us all covered.
The next pro tip is that I stick to is use Crisco/Shortening and make sure that stuff is room temperature. This is super important and many moons ago I used a chilly Crisco to cream with butter and my cookies had the texture of sand. So, just say no to Cold Crisco. Butter can be used, but it yields a cakier cookie that will spread-out in pan when baking. I have never been happy with the results when I have used butter. Once I did a hybrid of each, as I didn’t have enough Crisco and still wasn’t my desired outcome.
Last pro tip– eggs need to be room temperature. An easy way to do this. Fill a glass with hot tap water and let those eggs just hang out in that bath for a minute or two. They don’t cook in there, have no worries about that, they just reach room temperature quicky.
The other thing I would highly recommend is using a high-quality all-purpose flour. King Arthur in the red bag has always produced really nice cookies in my opinion.
Ingredients
- 3 Cups of Flour
- 2 Tsp. Baking Powder
- 1/4 Tsp. Salt
- 1 Cup Sugar
- 3 Eggs/Room Temperature
- 1 Cup of Shortening
- 2 Tbs. Vanilla
- Raw Sesame Seeds *
Not sharing an exact amount of the Sesame Seeds. I generally fill up a little/but shallow bowl and add more as I need, but a cup to a cup and a half should suffice.
Cream the Crisco with the sugar, I use a hand mixer takes only 30 seconds or so, add your eggs & vanilla. This comes together quickly. Looks like this, soupy but lovely:
Add flour, baking powder & the wee bit of salt (you don’t really need a separate bowl for this dry powder) add both together slowly, mix with the hand mixer and you’ll end up with this: Looks like a softer chocolate chip cookie batter:
Next you use your hands to roll out, I didn’t find that I needed to add flour, it’s a bit soft, but you can roll this out and into shape. End result/goal is that you have about a half of finger length shape tube to roll in your seeds to bake. You can see I roll mine out on a Silpat/a silicone baking mat and then dip in seeds and place on a tray that either has Silpat or parchment paper.
These cookies can be made in one really large cookie tray. They barely rise and the seeds stop them from sticking together. The longest part of this recipe is the rolling into shape and rolling into seeds. Some people dip the rolls into milk before the seeds to help them stick, but if you are using the shortening you shouldn’t have the need to use milk to get these seeds to adhere, if you are having issues and your dough is dry, by all means give them a milk bath and then roll in seeds.
Bake at 375 degrees for about 15 to 16 minutes. The last batch I did got brown around the edges, and I truly could have pulled them sooner, but they still tasted great.
The sesame seeds toast in the oven and you get a sweet toasty tasting biscotti. They also stay in an airtight container for a really long time, I am talking weeks. Not that they ever last that long in my house.
