Organic vegan shortbread with sesame seeds from La Sablésienne, 110 g — the least sweet and most interesting of the four, and the one to buy if you find most biscuits too sugary.
Sesame belongs in a biscuit more than people expect. Sesame seed is roughly half oil, and toasting it develops a deep, nutty, faintly savoury aroma that pushes a shortbread away from confectionery and towards something you might eat with cheese. In much of the Mediterranean and Middle East, sesame biscuits are a savoury or barely-sweet category rather than a dessert one — Greek koulouri, Middle Eastern barazek, Italian reginelle. This sits in that tradition rather than the patisserie one.
It also solves a problem specific to vegan shortbread. A traditional sablé gets its richness from butter and egg yolk, and the commonest failure of a vegan version is tasting thin — crisp but hollow. Sesame's oil content and roasted aroma fill exactly that gap. Of the four biscuits in this range, this is the one where being vegan is least noticeable, because the sesame is doing the work butter would have done.
Allergen: sesame. Stated plainly because it needs to be. Sesame is one of the fourteen allergens that must be declared under EU law, sesame allergy is increasingly common and can be severe, and it is frequently overlooked — partly because sesame turns up in so many products as a minor ingredient that people stop expecting it. In this biscuit it is a headline ingredient. If you are serving these to other people, say so out loud.
The technique. Sablage: fat rubbed into the flour before any liquid, coating the flour particles so they cannot hydrate and gluten cannot develop. That is what produces the short, sandy crumb the biscuit is named for — sablé means sandy.
Organic and vegan. Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
Smart Organic
LA SABLESIENNE
LA SABLESIENNE
TURTLE
