Wine Cookies

To clarify: the cookies in question do not contain wine; they are meant to accompany wine. The name's origins are somewhat murky. As I recall, a friend of mine once expressed a wish that there were cookies that would go with beer. I looked around a bit, found a recipe from Julia Child's magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and produced these. Best as I can remember, the people I first served them to determined that they were better suited to wine than to beer—possibly because of the blue cheese, but who the hell knows, frankly. For the record, JC calls these Galettes au Roquefort, or Roquefort Cheese Biscuits. I'm sticking with Wine Cookies. 




Should you be drawn to the original idea of Beer Cookies, please click here. Seriously, they go very well with beer.

Oddly enough, although I have sung JC's praises in many previous posts, this is the first time I've penned a blog post about one of her recipes. And even if I hadn't told you it was a JC recipe, you might have been able to guess from this assembly of ingredients:

Butter, cheese, cream, an egg, and some flour. Cholesterol? Qu'est-ce que c'est cholesterol?

For the record, although the core recipe here is JC's, I have modified the technique quite a bit. JC developed this recipe long before the food processor existed, so she has you make it by hand. I've modified it for the food processor, drawing heavily on her techniques for making pastry by machine. The different technique is why I call for chilled butter and she calls for softened butter. I've made some other changes as well, as will become apparent as we go along. I've been making this recipe for years, and haven't encountered any problems yet. That said, if you do have difficulties, it's probably my fault rather than JC's. 

I made two additions, one of which I think JC would approve of—a handful of walnuts, which I toasted briefly in a dry pan over medium heat for a few minutes. The other—1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper—maybe not so much. JC is not big on spicy foods. Neither is France, for that matter, African and Vietnamese influences notwithstanding.

Anyway, in a food processor, combine 3/4 cup flour, 1/4 lb. blue cheese (which you have crumbled), 1/4 lb (1 stick) chilled butter (which you have cut into smallish pieces) and 1/4 tsp cayenne and pulse a few times until roughly blended. What we're doing here is making a pie crust, essentially, with cheese substituting for some of the fat. This will reassure some people and terrify others. It's going to be OK.

Once you have cut the flour, butter and cheese together into pebbly bits, add 2 tbl cream and an egg yolk. I screwed up and added a whole egg, but it didn't seem to matter much. 

Now process until the dough forms into a ball. This happens quite quickly.

Form the dough into a rough disk, wrap it in plastic, and refrigerate it for at least one hour. You can leave it in the fridge for a day or two if you want, or you can freeze it. 

When you're ready to bake these, preheat your oven to 425 degrees F. Put the chilled dough onto a floured board, and roll it out to roughly 1/4 of an inch thick. Notice how you can barely see any flour on the board in the photo above? That's because I didn't flour it enough and my dough stuck like crazy. Don't be like me. 

If you have sufficient dough handling skills to roll it out into a rectangle, pray do so. My feeble efforts resulted in an amorphous mass roughly in the shape of Ireland (if you squint). It still works, though.

Take the walnuts—which I chopped when you weren't looking—and press them into the dough. 

Here is another point where JC and I part company. She has you cut the dough (without walnuts in her case) and bake it at this point, and you can do that. It's fine. Quite nice, really. But I usually end up fiddling with these things; it seems to be my nature. I'm fiddling with a technique I learned from her, though, so I don't feel too bad about modifying the master's (mistress's?) work. 

Basically, we're going to pretend we're making puff pastry. Using a dough scraper, or spatula, or knife, or what have you, lift up about 1/3 of the dough and flip it onto itself. 

Then flip the opposite third onto itself as well. In her writings on puff pastry, JC says you fold it like a business letter, which is as good a description as any.

The result looks something like this. 

Now take your rolling pin—which you will have floured more diligently than I have—and roll the dough out again.

You get another amorphous blob, although a slightly more rectangular one this time. 

Do the same business-letter flip one more time and roll the dough out again. Congratulations! You have now made pâte demi-feuilletée, or in Anglophone terms, "mock puff pastry." Again, though, you don't have to do this. You can just roll out the dough once, cut out your wine cookies/galettes and they will bake up just fine. These are a bit flakier (in the good way) and lighter. Lighter in texture, that is, not from a nutritional standpoint. We pretty much left nutrition behind with the "butter, cream, cheese," comment above. 

If you have a cookie cutter of some kind, you can use that. Alternately, use a pizza cutter or a sharp knife and just cut the dough into squares, triangles, diamonds, or whatever.

After you've cut out one batch, you can re-roll the dough scraps and cut more. For some reason, the ones made from scraps are never quite as pretty as the first batch, but hey, life is short. Don't sweat it.

Place them on a baking sheet lined with a silicone mat (as shown here), or parchment paper, or aluminum foil sprayed with non-stick spray. Brush them with beaten egg if you like. 

Bake them for 10-15 minutes until they puff up and brown nicely. 

Cool them on a rack. I can't really say how many they make because it depends on how you cut them, but using a small cutter about 1 1/4 inches across, I usually get about three dozen. Best to serve them the day you make them. 

Editing note: Normally, I try to transcribe recipes exactly as printed. In this case, however, I have modified the text. Because of the way Mastering is organized, JC's original version tells you to "bake as in the preceding recipe." Since I haven't given you the preceding recipe, I've cut and pasted the appropriate text into this one. Also, she seems to have forgotten the second egg (for brushing the tops of the galettes) in her list of ingredients, so I've added it here. If you want to check or critique my accuracy, the recipes in question are on pp.197-198 of Mastering, Vol. 1.

From Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1. 

Galettes au Roquefort

1/4 lb. Roquefort or blue cheese

A 2-quart mixing bowl

1/4 lb. softened butter

3/4 cup of flour

1 egg yolk

2 tablespoons whipping cream

[1 egg, beaten, for brushing on galettes—GM]

Lined or buttered baking sheets

The dough for these galettes may also serve as a pastry dough for tarts and turnovers. 

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. 

Mash the cheese in the bowl with a mixing fork. Beat in the butter, cream and egg yolk. Then knead in the flour. Form into a ball, wrap in waxed paper, and chill until firm. Roll out 1/4 inch thick, cut into 1 1/2-inch rounds, and place on baking sheets. Brush the tops with beaten egg and bake for 10 to 15 minutes until the galettes have puffed and browned lightly. Cool them on a rack.