For all you cookie lovers out there, you know that baking the best cookies with perfect texture can be a little tricky. You need the eggs to be the right size, the exact amount of flour, and the oven temp needs to be perfect. And even with all of that they sometimes don’t turn out how they are meant to. This is where the hardboiled egg yolks come in, adding one or two of these will create the most perfect shortbread every time.
So how does it work? Flour contains two proteins, gliadin and glutenin and when you knead the four with a liquid it brings the two proteins together to create gluten. This is what gives the dough the stretchy and chewy texture, which is great for pizza and bread but not so much for cookies. So this is how the hard-boiled egg yolks work, once they are passed through a sieve and mixed into the flour, the fat prevents too much gluten from developing resulting in crumbly and soft cookies.
You only need to add one or two hard-boiled eggs per batch of cookies, and you want to make sure they are completely cooled before you add them to the dough. Either use a fine mess sieve or a cheese grater to crumble them directly into the flour mixture and combine them with a fork.
So next time you make cookies, try adding a hard-boiled egg and see how the texture changes.
