After much deliberation, I decided the best savory cookie to kick off 2024 was Natasha Pickowicz’s Pine Nut Sablés with Taleggio from her best selling cookbook More Than Cake. Like the title implies, the book includes a variety of baking recipes beyond cake (although the layer cake recipes are incredible and well-worth exploring) – including, a variety of savory cookie recipes that perfectly fit the bill for this project. 

I was introduced to Natasha Pickowicz’s work early in 2023 when she collaborated with NYT Cooking on a video documenting the creation of her Toasted Sesame and Citrus Wedding Cake, start to finish. This video stood out from the many other complex layer-cake tutorials I’ve watched over the years in that her goal was to show viewers that they too could make their own wedding cake. The concept honestly blew my mind – it had never crossed my mind that an amateur home baker had the skills necessary to make something as impressive and significant as a wedding cake. I immediately purchased her cookbook, determined to try my hand at layer cakes. One Saturday afternoon, one of my best friend’s and fellow home-baker Sarah and I mapped out a layer cake using recipes from More Than Cake and created our own masterpiece: vanilla sponge, toasted sesame buttercream, yuzu curd and coconut streusel. It did take an entire afternoon, but the end result was incredibly satisfying – both to eat and to share with our friends and family.

Since then, I’ve continued to be drawn to Natasha’s unique perspective on flavors and her pragmatic yet whimsical approach to baking. She wants her recipes to be approachable so she does what she can to lower the threshold of entry, making baking more accessible. Natasha simplifies technique and provides helpful tips and detailed step-by-step photo instructions that bakers of all levels can easily follow. She provides clever work-arounds and encourages her audience to use what they have if they can’t find a particular specialty ingredient or tool (one of my favorite hacks was her layer cake assembly tip to use ordinary kitchen-items like mixing bowls, sauce pans, or casserole dishes to create domed cakes, round cakes or rectangular cakes – no fancy cake molds required).

Still, Natsha doesn’t let her goal of making baking more accessible stop her from challenging her audience’s palates. Many of her recipes include flavors that many American home bakers don’t see on a day-to-day basis: black sesame, yuzu, and sumac. She also frequently toes the line of sweet and savory. Shoyu, a Japanese-style soy sauce, plays a major role in her version of peanut butter cookies. She puts a spin on gingerbread by topping it with a vinegar-flavored glaze. She encourages using salty, nutty flavors to balance sweetness in many of her recipes. These qualities, in my opinion, make her a verifiable expert in the field of savory cookies and a perfect chef to learn from along my journey.

I had the pleasure of meeting Natasha when she hosted a cookie decorating workshop in my neighborhood. She invited her friend and artist Jordan Sondler to lead us in the art of water-color painting, using her signature gingerbread cookies topped with a matte-glaze as our canvas and edible food coloring as our pigment. In addition to being incredibly fun and a long-overdue opportunity for me to exercise my creative side, the event was very inspiring. Natasha’s energy was simultaneously relaxed and enthusiastic – creating a soft and supportive environment for artistry to freely flow. She and Jordan both spent the evening walking around the room, meeting the workshop attendees and discussing their mini masterpieces. She wanted to know what inspired us and never tried to contain her delight when she saw something that inspired her. I walked away with a signed cookbook, feeling proud of what I had made and relieved that she not only lived up to my hope of what she would be like – she exceeded it. It can be risky to meet your heroes, after all. 

The Pine Nut Sablés with Taleggio, I’m happy to report, also lived up to expectations.

The cookie itself is a sablés – a French butter cookie which differs from shortbread in that it includes eggs, or in the case of this recipe, egg yolks. This base-cookie recipe differs from a classic sablés in a few ways: 

1. Buckwheat flour – in addition to all purpose or AP flour, the recipe also calls for buckwheat flour. Buckwheat, I’ve learned, is actually a seed, not a grain or type of wheat which means that it doesn’t contain gluten. It lends a delicate, nutty/earthy quality that helps the cookie lean more savory than sweet. Buckwheat also gives the final cookie a darker, bluish speckled hue which makes the cookie visually more interesting. 
2. Fennel seed – one of the variations Natasha recommends is adding 1 tablespoon of fennel or caraway seeds to the cookie. I think this is in reference to creating a cookie sans pine nuts/taleggio, but after looking up taleggio and other washed-rind cheeses in Niki Segnit’s Flavor Thesaurus, anise is recommended as a complimentary flavor that can stand up to the “opinionated” aka funky flavor of the cheese. I thought it would be fun to experiment with adding the fennel, it being the less sweet cousin to anise and a frequently used ingredient in many other savory cookie recipes I’ve researched. Sure enough, it really worked! Next time, however, I might add slightly less than she recommended if I were to add to the pine nut/taleggio version – fennel goes a long way even ½ a tablespoon would have still contributed a sweet, liquorice-esque note. 
3. Pine nuts – before the cookie is baked, pine nuts are pressed into the top. Pine nuts, like the buckwheat, also lend a soft nuttiness to the final product and their buttery texture provide textural intrigue and variance to each bite. 
4. Flaky salt – salt makes everything better and can help bring an otherwise sweet cookie closer to the savory side. Long live Maldon. 

The cookie by itself, particularly with the addition of fennel, has a bit of sweetness to it. What really makes this cookie a savory cookie is what you add after the cookies come out of the oven: taleggio cheese. 

Taleggio cheese is an Italian cheese that falls into a category called washed-rind cheeses. Washed-rind cheeses are cheeses where the rind of the cheese has been coated in a brine with the intent of promoting bacterial growth. The result is a reddish-colored rind, a distinctly funky smell, and a strong flavored, often soft cheese. Taleggio is on the softer side as far as washed-rind cheeses go and flavor-wise compares closely to brie. The taleggio I purchased to pair with the pine nut sablés was actually a buffalo-milk taleggio, lending it a slightly more robust flavor. I have never bought taleggio before, so one fun part of the experience was seeing the little patches of furry, gray mold growing on the rind. As someone who strongly believes in eating the rind and never leaving it behind, I did decide to leave it on and in my opinion, it did not impact the flavor very much at all (and who knows – the bacteria may be positively contributing to my microbiome!)

Natasha describes the final cookie, when paired with a slice of taleggio, as an entire composed dish in one bite. I have to agree with her assessment – the combination of cookie and cheese resulted in a layered and complex mouthful. Texturally, flavorfully, and visually. Nutty, funky, with a floral sweetness from the fennel. The cookie had an excellent snap but also crumbled in your mouth – the quintessential quality of a sablés. 

I was a bit nervous to share these cookies with friends who have less adventurous palates given the funkiness of the taleggio, but was pleasantly surprised to see that they quite enjoyed the pairing. I wonder if the format of the cookie makes it easier to try a new and unfamiliar flavor. Practically, it’s low-commitment (only one bite). Conceptually, a cookie is friendly. It represents innocence and comfort. That combination may make cookies the perfect gate-way to something that you otherwise would have never tried.

Report Card

savory-ness (1-5)	cookie by itself: 2 cookie with taleggio: 3.5
weird or works? (complimentary flavors or a little bit weird?)	works! fennel, nuts, funk with a hint of salt and sweetness, all extremely complimentary
savory ingredients	taleggio cheese + pine nuts + buckwheat flour + fennel
best served…	as the star of your cheese board
encore?	will make again and again! easy and extremely tasty.