Salted Vanilla Shortbread
Melt in your mouth vanilla shortbread cookies that are flaky and tender, topped with turbinado sugar and flaky sea salt. This easy shortbread recipe does not use butter (you won’t miss it one bit!)
Truly, there is nothing traditional about this shortbread recipe but I can’t say I’m sorry for it. These are totally delicious for what they are: buttery without the butter, crumbly and crunchy in the all the right ways, there’s a little crisp from the turbinado sugar which also lends a slightly caramel-like taste, and a well balanced salt ratio ad some flaky sea salt on top gives these so much flavor. Sweet & salty lovers, you’ll like these!
This recipe has some origins in the shortbread layer of these shortbread brownies, and takes some inspiration from Deb’s Olive Oil Shortbread.
P.S. Did I time this so that we’d be able to make it in time for season 3 of Ted Lasso? I sure did!
P.P.S. there’s a chocolate version coming soon!
Why this vanilla shortbread recipe is deliciously unique
It doesn’t use butter: By wonderful happenstance, this shortbread recipe is vegan and dairy free. Instead of butter we’re using avocado oil, which has that buttery taste quality to it giving it excellent flavor, but also coats the flour more evenly than butter. It’s wonderfully flaky, without butter!
It has a mix of sugars: Powdered sugar and the starch in it, give it this melt in your mouth texture, turbinado sugar adds a bit of caramel taste and gives it some crispyness.
It takes almost no effort: The most you’ll sweat over is sifting in the flour to make the batter. Everything is mixed in one bowl then pressed into a pan.
Tender and crumbly texture: These are messy, in the very best way. Think of the way a good croissant shatters when you cut into it, it’s the same with these shortbread!
Ingredient Info
Flour
All purpose *but* I’ll implore you to use a low protein all purpose like White Lily which is very finely sifted, has a 9% protein content (close to cake flour!) and therefore allows for much less gluten to form.
Can’t find a low protein all purpose? If you’re using KAB, you can do a mix of cake and all purpose: 1 1/2 cup cake flour, 1 ½ cups all purpose. This will get you close.
No cake flour? Go all in with the all purpose. It won’t be as ‘flaky’ but it’ll still be great. For a gluten-free bake, use a 1 to 1 gf flour swap like King Arthur’s or Bob’s.
Powdered sugar: preferably organic made with tapioca (not cornstarch). Adds to the crumbly texture and the melt on the tongue quality of the shortbread.
Turbinado sugar: Raw sugar that hasn’t undergone extensive processing and refining. The big crystals don’t really melt so they add a lovely crunch in the shortbread. And since they’re less refined they have more of that natural molasses taste. I love it here. No subs!
Fine sea salt & flaky sea salt: The former for adding to the dough the latter to sprinkle on top. Skip the flaky if you don’t like that punch of flavor.
Vanilla: You want to use quite a bit and a good quality for this recipe. I like a pure vanilla extract and/or vanilla bean paste.
Avocado oil: To me, this is the magic ingredient. Avocado oil gives us all those qualities that we talked about (coats the flour to prohibit gluten from forming, keeps them from being overly dry) but has the added bonus of having a buttery taste.
Use another flavorless oil if you don’t want/can’t use avocado, grapeseed would be good here.
Why is this salted shortbread baked twice?
With a cursory look at the instructions, you’ll see I’ll ask you to bake the shortbread first in a square pan then to slice it and bake it again on a sheet pan. This isn’t how shortbread is usually made and is more often done to biscotti (which literally means twice baked). But I digress!
I do a twice-bake so that we can get golden edges all around each and every shortbread. They only need another ten minutes in the oven after the first bake so it won’t be long but does something magical, adding to those caramel-like notes that the turbinado sugar does here.
Flavoring the vanilla shortbread
Citrus: Use any citrus zest and add it to the dough: lemon, lime, orange, etc. For an added boost of flavor you can add an extract like lemon extract.
Chocolate: Add ½ cup mini chocolate chips or skip the turbinado/sea salt topping and after baking, dip the shortbread fingers into melted chocolate to coat and then add some flaky sea salt!
Mint: I had an earlier version where I added both mint and lemon zest; I did it by grinding up the mint with the turbinado sugar and adding it straight to the dough. Warming: the shortbread will be greenish!
Vanilla Brown Butter Shortbread
I had a reader (hi Elin!!!) swap the avocado oil in the recipe for browned butter and while I tried it in my chocolate shortbread, and didn’t taste the bb enough for it to be worthy, I thought there was a very good chance it would do wonders here. I tried it with the vanilla bean in the butter as it browns method I use in this cake and holy hell, it was amazing. Here’s how to do it:
Set 230g butter (I like using salted European butter here and reducing the salt in the recipe to 1/4 tsp) in a saucepan and begin melting. Once it’s mostly melted, add a scraped vanilla bean (the scrapings too) and continue cooking as it browns. You’ll see tiny specks of vanilla all over, don’t confuse them with the slightly larger milk solids you’ll see separating from the liquid and turning brown. Once browned, transfer to a heatproof bowl add a teaspoon of vanilla extract (skip the tablespoon of paste), stir and let cool slightly.
Remove the vanilla bean and discard. You can now add the brown butter to the recipe in place of the oil. Be sure to scrape up all the black (vanilla) and brown (milk solids) bits into the dough.
Adding the freshly scraped bean to the dough does WONDERS. You’ll taste the vanilla like never before with the notes of brown butter.
P.S. If you still want this to be dairy free, you can brown vegan butter too!
Salted Vanilla Shortbread
Ingredients
- 390g or 3 cups all purpose flour preferably a low protein AP, like White Lily
- 80g or ⅔ cups powdered sugar preferably organic, made with tapioca starch
- 70g or ⅓ cup turbinado sugar plus more
- 1 teaspoons fine sea salt
- 1 tablespoon pure vanilla paste or extract
- 200g or scant 1 cup avocado oil OR browned butter for the brown butter, measure after browning (see notes above)
- Flaky sea salt
Method
- Preheat the oven to 350 F. Line an 8 inch square pan with parchment paper.
- Into a large bowl, sift the flour and the powdered sugar. Add the salt and whisk.
- Add the turbinado sugar, the vanilla and the avocado oil and stir with a rubber spatula until the dough is well combined.
- Press the dough into an even layer into the pan. Take care pressing it down, either with the back of a spatula, your hands or the bottom of a measuring cup so it’s smooth on top.
- Sprinkle 2-3 tablespoons of turbinado sugar on top, then a light sprinkle of flaky sea salt.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes until it’s beginning to turn golden.
- Take it out of the oven and use the parchment sling to remove the shortbread. It’s ok if it cracks a bit, nudge it back into place with the side of a knife.
- Line a greased cookie sheet with parchment paper.
- Slice the shortbread into half, then quarter then slice each quarter into half so you have 8 columns. Now slice from the other side into thirds.
- Use a fish spatula to gently lift each cookie and place it on the prepared cookie sheet. Ensure there’s at least a half inch space between each cookie (they won't spread but we want them to cook on the edges).
- Once all the cookies are on the pan, set it back in the oven (still at 350 F) for another 10 minutes.
- Store in an airtight container, it’ll keep for a week.
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These cookies are truly amazing — we love them so much that we can’t go back to regular butter shortbread anymore! We cut the recipe by half (apprehensive about the unconventional ingredients and to limit the temptation in case these’d be great). Used half cake and half AP flour, made our own powdered sugar by just grinding regular sugar in mini food chopper, used sanding sugar instead of turbinado sugar because we don’t have any turbinado on hand and used a 6.5″ square baking tin (smallest we have). Lifting the cookies out and cutting them after first bake was challenging because they were so soft, we did bake longer in both bakes and even at 375 for the 2nd bake in the last couple minutes to try to speed it up and get more golden color. The cookies were tender even cooled but crisped up perfectly the next day. Will make again & again, will try baking 1st bake in springform pan to protect the delicate cookies from bending while lifting, thanks!!
Made three batches so far over the holidays, and a few times before; an absolute favorite of family members with dairy and egg allergies. Have tried the recipe exactly as written, and you get a rich shortbread with a lovely texture, and the flavor is buttery and pairs beautifully with the salted/sugared topping. A few variations that were also delicious were using smoked salt and using half grapeseed oil (ran out of avocado) – this added a more savory quality that brought out the toasted flavor of the browned edges and base. Love this recipe (and the chocolate ones, too)!
These taste like you’ve spent hours in the kitchen, but was such a quick and simple recipe. No one could believe that they were vegan either!
exactly what i was going for! thank you for the comment rachael!
Curious if this recipe in thinner application work well for the crust of lemon bars…where it’s pre-baked and then topped with lemon/egg mixture for second bake to complete the lemon bars?
I think that would work fine – it’ll be less crispy overall but that is usually fine for lemon bars.
Thank you for your advice Sam, I really appreciate it. I will pop out to get the tapioca to add to the powdered sugar. So looking forward to these, I’ve already made your dairy free brownie cookies and we LOVE those. Doing this shortbread and your oil based ccc next! I’d also like to say a big thank you for adding weight measurements to your recipes, this really helps me a lot. Thanks again!
Hi Sam, really excited to make this for my family. I’ve recently found your website and my youngest has allergies, so am really pleased to be able to make these sort of homemade treats for her. I was hoping you could give some extra guidance regarding the powdered sugar… does it need the tapioca mix, or would pure powdered sugar be sufficient? Just wondering if I could use the pure sugar I already have at home, or if I should buy the mix before attempting the recipe? Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Hi! Store-bought powdered sugars are mixed with something to keep them from clumping, it’ll either be cornstarch or tapioca starch. If you’ve made yours and it’s just pure sugar that you’ve ground into a powder, I might add some starch to it because it gives the cookies more of a ‘melt in your mouth’ feel, swap out two teaspoons of the sugar for some starch, that should suffice.
I made the browned butter variation on these this weekend. I live in (very dry) Colorado and added a little avocado oil to hit 200g of fat since my melted butter was less than 200g and the mixture seemed dry. These turned out so wonderfully delicious. I liked the technique of baking them in slices for a nice edge on each cookies (i wouldn’t call it crispy exactly). This is a cookie I feel like the browned butter actually comes through in the final product and is worth the extra effort.
Thanks for replying, Sam! I watched your video and was able to match the dough consistency and they turned out much better 🙂 I did change the recipe a bit though. If anyone else is having trouble, I browned my butter first and let it resolidify at room temperature then weighed out 200g. I mixed the butter and vanilla together first in a kitchenaid mixer until creamy then added in 90g powdered sugar (+10 to the original recipe) and mixed again until combined. I skip adding the turbinado sugar into the dough – I just used it on top — this is why I added an extra 10g of the powdered sugar. And I actually ended up using only 240g of flour (120 ap and 120 cake flour) and the recommend 1tsp of salt. Whisked this together first then added to the kitchen aid bowl and mixed w/ the paddle attachment until a soft dough came together. Baked 22 mins at 350, sliced, and baked another 7 minutes (I found if I baked longer than this that the shortbread pieces start to puff up and explode a little bit. This is probably because of the added air from the whipping, but I prefer this texture, as it is more “melt in your mouth” than what I was getting before). Maybe this isn’t even technically shortbread anymore but they do taste very good, look good, and have a great texture!
I haven’t made any of your cookies yet. But, I intend to do so! I’m happy I found your site!!
aw, I’m happy to hear it and hope you find something you love to make!
My dough turned out way too dry…I did the half cake flour / half ap flour and did 205g of each. I’m realizing the recipe says 3 cups flour but also 410g whereas normally 3 cups (of ap flour) is 360g? Any insight here?
I started with 230g of butter and browned it but I didn’t weigh it afterwards. Wondering if I lost too much water here as well.
I’m going to try again with measuring my butter but I’m worried about the amount of flour. We shall see. Any tips would be great! Thanks!
You are correct about the amount of flour, I’ve fixed it now (390 by my calculations). Definitely weigh the butter afterwards because more moisture can be lost depending on how long it is browned (and what type of butter). Also the thing about using half ap half cake is you still have that extra gluten from the AP which is different than a full low-protein flour, I would add a tablespoon more oil (something flavorless) or more melted butter to get the right balance (see the video for how wet the dough should look).
Man, these are good! I don’t usually keep avocado oil on hand, and I love the taste of brown butter, so I went with that option and absolutely ADORED it! I ended up with a little less than 200 grams after browning, but they still turned out just fine. They came together so quickly and tasted wonderful- that crunch from the turbinado sugar was just delicious. I did have a little bit of trouble with cutting them, as I got a bit confused with the last part “slice from the other side into thirds.” I just decided to stay simple and cut them into 16 squares just as I would for brownies or other bars. They are so rich, though, so in the future I might cut them even smaller, or even use little cookie cutters after the first baking. I also can really see how adding a glaze or something could also be really tasty- the options are endless!
Man, these are good! I don’t usually keep avocado oil on hand, and I love the taste of brown butter, so I went with that option and absolutely ADORED it! They came together so quickly and tasted wonderful- that crunch from the turbinado sugar was just delicious.
Every recipe I’ve made from this site has been incredible, and this recipe is no exception. I also opted for the browned butter option outlined in the text before the recipe, and it was definitely the move. These came out incredible and everyone at the potluck was asking for the recipe!
Hannah, this is SO wonderful to hear!!! Love that you tried the bb version!
My first time making shortbread and my husband was so surprised. These are easy and delicious. I already jarred my flour and powdered sugar so I couldn’t check for protein or if sugar was with cornstarch or tapioca and they still turned out magnificent. Highly recommend.
Could the dough be made ahead of time and frozen, then thawed before baking? Thanks!
nope, it’ll dry out. It’s not the kind of dough you need to make ahead of time to freeze tbh, it doesn’t require a rest or a chill and doesn’t take long to mix. plus the shortbread last a week after baking so its fine to make fully ahead of time.
I used 200 grams of brown butter instead of avocado oil and they turned out absolutely divine (as per usual when I follow a recipe of yours:))!
BRILLIANT
Do you think one could use gluten free all purpose flour?
yep use a 1 to 1 swap!
Any substitute for avocado oil pls?
something flavorless like grapeseed
Hi Sam ~ A question for you:
For the second bake, is it truly necessary to grease the cookie sheet if it’s going to be lined with parchment?
Getting ready to make these for guests, and will be sure to review them here when they’re done.
Hi Sarah! So I grease it to hold the parchment paper in place, you don’t need much, it’s to avoid having the paper sliding around when you are trying to place the cookies on it
And might I add, that I have made it too! Like Barbara I cut the recipe exactly in half, using an 8 x 4 inch loaf pan. This is slated for our dessert tonight, but bad boy “me” already ate one of the 12 fingers….OMG! Fantabulous sophisticated shortbread, and I am forever hooked. I actually had Avocado oil in our fridge. The only thing I did not have was the soft flour that you dig. I did use all purpose unbleached flour, but may I share something? I will swear on my whisk that this is true….I searched on line for the White Lily A.P. bleached flour and while readily available, there is a cooking warehouse type of store near downtown Los Angeles…..It was half of the prices I saw on line, and I did the 30 mile round trip to get a 5 pound bag of White Lily. Even snagged a bottle of Passion Fruit syrup :). Thank you Sam, sincerely.
Gah, this is so wonderful to hear Jeff – can’t believe you went all the way out for the flour! Thank you for this comment =)
I love how easy and delicious this shortbread is! The dough comes together so quick too. In full disclosure, I cut the recipe in half and baked it in a loaf pan. I realized halfway through that instead of cutting the salt and vanilla in half I accidentally used the full amount. They still taste great though!!
oh gosh barbara, you already made it!! this is so wonderful to hear! and lol, I guess a little more salt and a lot more vanilla can’t be a bad thing ;p