In Grandma Mabel’s kitchen there were huge bins for flour and sugar built right in. Giant bags of sugar and flour were delivered to her bakery and dumped into those bins. I never got to see that kitchen but I could picture it when Dad described it.
Giant bags of sugar and flour arrive at our bakery, too. All our sugar and flour are organic. We added up all the shortbread you bought last year and figured out how much flour, butter and sugar went into those cookies. We used over 1300 pounds of sugar at the bakery last year.
All our sugar, whether it is regular granulated, brown, or icing is sourced from companies that work directly with farmers. We only use cane sugar and it is always organic.
What does that mean for you? Why do we go to extra lengths to buy organic? We want to create the cleanest, best tasting shortbread we can. And that means the finest ingredients. We want to participate in sustainable practices and we want to be good business partners, so that farmers get a fair price for their product. Organic farming creates a better product, since farmers must use practices that maintain or enhance the soil and water quality. Chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are not allowed.
That means that the organic sugar cane that is turned into raw sugar is only processed once versus up to three times for white sugar. This pretty much leaves only the sweetness as flavour. Because it is less processed, organic sugar has its own distinctive flavour due to the natural molasses content in each sugar crystal.
When we were creating our original shortbread at Sable Shortbread, adapting our family recipe to create our Traditional Shortbread, we spent quite a bit of time fine tuning the recipe because of the unique tastes of both the organic sugar and the organic flour. The result is what we think is a pretty delicious shortbread based on the original that has its very own unique flavour profile: It is Real. It is Canadian. It is Shortbread.
Sable Shortbread.
Real Canadian Shortbread.