Tuzlu Kuru Pasta (Traditional Turkish Savory Cookies) Recipe

Traditional Turkish savoury cookies, aka tuzlu kuru pasta, are one of the most memorable flavours I remember from my childhood. Those legendary cookies that can be eaten with lemonade at weddings, tea on birthdays. The freshest can be eaten at the patisseries, the most stale one at grandmother's house.

There will be those who remember, I shared a bakery style butter cookies recipe before. Today, here is the savory version of those bakery cookies recipe. This recipe will allow you to get cookies with a texture that disperses in the mouth as soon as you bite into them, with a taste and smell that will be as good as the ones we ate in the past. You can get different flavors with the same dough, different shapes and different decorations. If you wish, you can divide the dough and add different flavorings, such as paprika, to the dough to get even more different flavors.

Since the most prominent feature of the recipe is shaping, the consistency of the dough is very important. If you do not get the right consistency of dough, you may have problems in shaping. The ingredient that determines the consistency of the dough is undoubtedly flour. So be extra careful about the amount of the flour.

Using too much or too little flour can cause you to have trouble shaping it. So always be careful to add the flour in smaller pieces, more carefully than you should. If you find it difficult to work with the dough, instead of adding flour immediately, first put the dough in the refrigerator and let it rest for ten minutes. If the ambient or hand temperature is too high in buttered doughs, the butter may melt too much and the consistency of the dough may become misleading. If you see a layer of oil on the dough that appears slightly separate from the dough, this is your problem and the solution.

On the other hand, if the dough does not have a layer of oil on it, but when you take a piece of dough in your hand, you feel that it is too chunky, and no matter how hard you squeeze it, it does not gather and form and falls into small pieces, the problem is not too much melted butter, but too much flour. In that case, you need to add liquid to the dough. I'm sure 99% of those reading this article right now thought of adding milk. But unfortunately that would be the worst thing you can do. Normally there is no milk in the dough, there must be a reason for that. So at least if the recipe you're using was created by someone who knows what they're doing, there's a reason. If you ignore this reason and add an ingredient to the dough that should not be in it, you will spoil the consistency of the dough.

The way to compensate for using excess flour without spoiling the consistency of the dough is to increase one of the liquids in the dough. When many people think of liquids, they only think of ingredients that can be poured from a cup to another cup, but in the kitchen, two plus two is not always four, so this is a bit different. In pastries, anything that soaks the flour and melts when wet, is liquid. In this case, the liquids in this recipe are butter, oil, yogurt, eggs and sugar.

If we go from the end to the beginning, sugar cannot be our savior, as it is not possible to increase the amount of sugar enough to affect the consistency of the dough. Although the egg is a good savior, it may not be right to waste a whole egg, as a whole egg may be too much. However, if your dough is pouring like sand, that is, if you used too much flour rather than a little too much, you can add an egg. Yogurt is one of the easiest ingredient to use, the easiest ingredient that can be fed into the dough and save the dough most easily. But you should be very careful about one thing when deciding on its use. That's the amount of butter in the dough. If the dough is buttery enough, you can add yogurt. But if you somehow think that the butter of the dough is low, adding a fat-free liquid will cause your cookies to be hard. Liquid oil is not a suitable savior since it does not have a binding feature, on the contrary, it gives a dispersed structure to the dough. Another ingredient that is equally easy to use as yogurt is butter. When using butter, you should pay attention to the amount of fat in the dough, as in yogurt. If you already have a very buttery dough, yogurt would be a better remedy. If the dough looks dry rather than oily, butter is a more suitable savior. If you are going to use butter, you should definitely use it in the consistency recommended in the recipe, that is, at room temperature. If you can't decide whether the dough needs butter or yoghurt, you can also add a little bit of both.

Enjoy the recipe...

Bon Appetit...