On coming Thursday, our cooking team is trying to cook Suan La Tang (Hot and Sour Soup) and Chinese almond cookies.
For the cookies, they use lard (pork fat) instead of butter (made from cow milk, of course). I think 100 % lard would be challenging as none of us had baked cookies with lard.
This is a recipe from http://allrecipes.com and I changed the amount of ingredients a little. Measuring with “cup” is always problem since we never know its accurate size. I tried to convert the amount into “g”.
Ingredients
- 280 g sifted all-purpose flour
- 100 g white sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 170 g lard (or half butter, half lard)
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon almond extract
- 48 almonds (Instead of whole almonds, we’re going to use sliced almond)
Prep 40 m Cook 15 m Ready in 55 m
- Preheat oven to 165 degrees C.
- Sift flour, sugar, baking soda and salt together into a bowl. Cut in the lard until mixture resembles cornmeal. Add egg and almond extract. Mix well.
- Roll dough into 2.5 cm balls. Set them 5 cm apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Place an almond on top of each cookie and press down to flatten slightly.
- Bake in the preheated oven until the edges of the cookies are golden brown, 15 to 18 minutes.
100% butter type
Baked butter cookies
Following is one of the recipes of home-made lard.