For my second recipe I knew I needed to make my families all-time favourite cookie, shortbread! I knew adding sourdough starter to cookies wasn’t unheard of, but I had never done it before, which is the point of this inquiry! I want to get outside of my comfort zone and try new things using sourdough starter!

I knew that I was getting together with some friends and offered to bake these cookies up for them to try! For this sourdough shortbread recipe, it was quite simple, just flour, butter, powdered sugar and sourdough starter and some salt. I was skeptical at first but did decide to let the sourdough shortbread dough sit and ferment in the fridge for 1 day (like I tend to do with bread) and see if it would develop a nice sour flavour like bread is known for and it wasn’t like a typical sourdough, but it developed a nice complex flavour. I wish I had compared the cookies by making one batch right away and another batch a day after mixing the dough.

I really wasn’t too sure how they were going to turn out, but after 22 minutes in the oven the cookies were slightly golden and almost ready to be shipped off to my friends house after a quick 20 minutes of cooling the cookies (a very important step) so they are less likely to crumble or break during transport.

Overall, cookies survived the transport, and had 5/5 stars from my taste testers! They said the cookies were tasty, slightly different from traditional shortbread and liked how the sourdough decreased some of the sweetness from the cookies.

From a future teacher’s perspective, I think that baking a recipe that is loved in your family, and documenting what you’ve made through pictures and then sharing it with others (e.g., the class, friends, family) could be a really interesting project for middle school aged students to do. It invites other classmates, and the teacher into the students’ world. It would make for a good ADST, social studies and/or even english language arts assignment. A teacher could talk about different cultures within the classroom and ask students to create a dish from their culture to share with the class. This could be a good assignment to do at the beginning of the year when everyone is getting to know each other, and the teacher is trying to foster that sense of classroom community.