The regional table / Oregon
Hazelnut Shortbread
Published October 12, 2026 · Oregon
Oregon grows nearly every hazelnut in the country and calls them something else, and the one thing the state's own archive has nothing at all to say about is this biscuit.
Start with the honest gap. Searching the Historic Oregon Newspapers archive for "filbert shortbread" returns no pages, and so does "hazelnut shortbread". The nearest local precedent is a recipe, not a tradition: the Hillsboro Argus of 6 December 1928 prints "Butterscotch Filbert Cookies" — a cup and a half of shortening, two cups of brown sugar, two teaspoons of baking powder, two eggs and a cup of chopped filberts, creamed in the usual way — and the phrase "filbert cookies" turns up only seventeen times in the whole collection. Shortbread is Scottish and nobody in Oregon claims otherwise. What Oregon has is the nut, and the nut is documented to the acre. Extension bulletin EC 1219, "Growing Hazelnuts in Oregon", published by the OSU Extension Service in May 1985 by Lloyd Baron, Craig Riggert, Robert Stebbins and Susan Bell, states it plainly: "Virtually all of the commercial production of hazelnuts in the United States comes from the Pacific Northwest. About 97% of the U.S. production comes from the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. Washington produces the remaining 3%." The same page puts that in proportion — the Northwest grows "4 to 6% of world hazelnut production" — which is the whole economic position of the crop in two sentences.
The name is a document too, and the documents disagree in a way that is itself the answer. The OSU bulletin of 1985 says it outright: "Although growers in Oregon usually call them filberts, most customers know them as hazelnuts." Its own predecessor, Extension Bulletin 628 of October 1969 by Baron and Stebbins, is titled "Growing Filberts in Oregon" — the same authors, the same crop, the older word. The federal government settled the question by refusing to choose: 7 CFR 982.4, in the marketing order for the crop, defines its subject as "hazelnuts or filberts produced in the States of Oregon and Washington from trees of the genus Corylus", a definition dated 22 April 1996. As for where the word came from, EC 1219 gives two readings and backs neither: that filbert was originally "full beard", because in some varieties the husk entirely covers the nut, or that it comes from St. Philibert, because 22 August, the date dedicated to him, "corresponds to the ripening date of the earliest hazelnuts in England". The quantities below were worked out for this page, from a nut with a federal grade standard and a biscuit with none.
Why this version works
Toast the nuts separately and bake the biscuit pale. These are two different browning jobs and they need different heats. Hazelnut flavour comes from roasting, which wants a hot dry oven and about ten minutes; shortbread flavour comes from butter, which is ruined by the same treatment. So the nuts go in at 350 °F on their own and the dough goes in at 325 °F and comes out when it is barely coloured at the edge. A shortbread baked to golden brown all over tastes of toast rather than of butter.
Shortbread is a fat ratio, and the law fixes one of the terms. Shortbread works on roughly one part sugar to two parts butter to three parts flour by weight, and the butter is the only ingredient of the three whose composition is set by statute. Under 21 U.S.C. 321a, butter is made exclusively from milk or cream "and containing not less than 80 per centum by weight of milk fat". That 80 percent is what the whole structure depends on: a cup of butter brings about 180 grams of fat and 40 grams of water, and it is the water that makes just enough steam and gluten to hold the thing together while the fat keeps it from becoming bread. Substitute anything with more water — a spreadable blend, which may be well under 80 percent — and the biscuit comes out tough and pale rather than short.
The pellicle will not all come off, and that is in the bulletin. EC 1219 is specific about the skin on the dominant Oregon variety: "Barcelona (figure 1) is the principal variety grown in Oregon", favoured for the inshell market for "its round shape and superior flavor", and "The kernels of Barcelona have a coarse, brown outer coating, or pellicle, which is very difficult to remove completely, even after roasting." Knowing that saves twenty minutes of rubbing nuts in a towel. Get most of it off, discard the loose skins, and let the rest go into the dough, where it reads as colour and a faint bitterness that the sugar needs.
The nuts are a quarter fat by weight again, and they replace flour, not butter. The USDA record for hazelnuts gives 60.8 grams of fat and 5.31 grams of water per hundred grams, with 15 grams of protein and no gluten. Ground and swapped in for a quarter of the flour, that does two things at once: it adds fat, which shortens the crumb further, and it removes gluten-forming flour, which is what keeps a shortbread from becoming chewy at the edges. Swap the nuts for butter instead and the dough turns greasy and spreads in the tin. It is also worth knowing the records disagree: the Foundation Foods entry for raw hazelnuts reads 53.5 grams of fat and 26.5 grams of carbohydrate against the legacy record's 60.8 and 16.7, which is the normal spread between batches of a crop, not an error.
Ingredient notes
The sugar: half a cup plus a tablespoon of plain granulated sugar, which is the one part of the one-two-three. Caster or superfine dissolves faster and gives a smoother surface; granulated leaves a faint sandy crunch that most people like in shortbread. Icing sugar makes a softer, more melting biscuit and a paler one, and it is a legitimate variation rather than a mistake. Grinding a spoonful of the sugar with the nuts keeps them from turning to butter in the processor.
The butter: a cup, unsalted, cool but workable — about 65 °F, firm enough to hold a thumbprint without sliding. Salted butter is not a disaster but it takes the salt decision out of your hands, and shortbread needs more salt than most biscuits to stop a half pound of butter tasting flat. Do not melt it or beat it to a foam: shortbread is not a cake and air in the dough gives a crumb that collapses.
The hazelnuts: three quarters of a cup of raw kernels, about 85 grams, toasted and ground. Buy raw rather than roasted, because you want to control the roast, and buy them somewhere with turnover: a nut at 60 percent fat goes rancid, and rancidity is the one fault you cannot bake out. The federal grade standards for filberts in the shell are a good guide to what you are paying for — "Dry means that the shell is free from surface moisture, and that the shells and kernels combined do not contain more than 10 percent moisture", a blank is "a filbert containing no kernel or a kernel filling less than one-fourth the capacity of the shell", and a kernel is "reasonably well developed" only when it "fills one-half or more of the capacity of the shell". Blanched kernels are sold with the pellicle already off and work perfectly well; the legacy record puts them at 61.2 grams of fat, no different in practice.
The flour and the salt: two cups of plain flour and half a teaspoon of fine salt. No baking powder and no eggs: the 1928 Hillsboro cookie has both and is a different thing entirely, a soft creamed cookie that happens to contain filberts. Shortbread has four ingredients and its texture comes from the ratio and the handling, which is why measuring the flour by weight, at 255 grams, is worth doing if you have a scale.
Step by step
- Toast the nuts and rub them. Heat the oven to 350 °F and spread the raw kernels on a tray. Toast 10 to 12 minutes, until the skins crack and the kitchen smells of them, then tip them into a clean tea towel, fold it over and rub hard for a minute. Most of the pellicle will come off and some of it will not — the bulletin says so, so stop there. Let them cool completely before grinding; warm nuts turn to paste.
- Grind them with a little of the sugar. Put the cooled nuts in a food processor with a tablespoon of the sugar and pulse in short bursts to a coarse meal with a few bigger pieces left in, about the texture of semolina. Do not let the machine run: fifteen seconds too long and you have hazelnut butter. A rolling pin and a bag works if you have no processor.
- Cream the butter and sugar just until smooth. Beat the butter with the remaining sugar and the salt until they are combined and the colour has barely lightened — a minute by hand, half that with a mixer. Stop before it goes pale and fluffy. The texture you want is paste, not mousse.
- Bring the dough together and press it in. Add the flour and the ground nuts in two goes and work them in with a spatula or your hands until the dough is uniform and still crumbly, then tip it into an 8-inch square tin or a 9-inch round one and press it flat and even with your knuckles and the back of a spoon. Prick it all over with a fork, right through, and score the pieces now — sixteen fingers or wedges — because a baked shortbread shatters where you did not cut it.
- Bake slow, at 325 °F, and take it out pale. Drop the oven to 325 °F and bake 40 to 50 minutes. It is ready when the surface looks dry and matt, the edges are the colour of straw and the centre still gives slightly to a finger. There is no brown on a good shortbread except at the rim.
- Cut it hot, cool it in the tin. Run a knife straight down through the scored lines within two or three minutes of the tin leaving the oven, while the biscuit is still soft, then leave it in the tin, undisturbed, until it is completely cold — at least an hour. It firms as it cools, and lifting a warm piece out breaks it. Lift the cold pieces out with a palette knife.
A shortbread that crumbles into sand when you lift it was either under-baked in the middle or cut cold, and the second is the commoner mistake: the pieces have to be cut hot and lifted cold, in that order. If it has already broken up, crush the rest deliberately and use it — it is better than any shop-bought crumb base for a tart. A dough that will not come together in the tin has either cold butter in it or too much flour; warm it with your hands for a minute rather than adding liquid, because water in shortbread makes it hard. The opposite failure, a greasy biscuit that spreads and bubbles, means the butter was too soft or it was beaten to a foam — chill the pressed dough in the tin for 30 minutes before baking and it will hold. Burnt edges with a raw middle mean the tin was too thin or the oven too hot: drop it to 300 °F and give it longer. Bitterness is the nuts, not the method, and it is either rancid kernels or pellicle left on in quantity; neither can be fixed after baking.
Storage and make-ahead
Shortbread keeps better than almost anything else on this site. In an airtight tin at room temperature it is good for 2 weeks and arguably better after two days, once the butter flavour has settled and the crumb has dried a little. Keep it away from anything moist — one slice of cake in the same tin will soften the lot overnight — and do not refrigerate it, which makes it hard and dulls the taste.
The dough freezes well, which is the better way to get ahead. Press it into the tin, wrap the tin and freeze up to 3 months, then bake from frozen with 10 minutes added. Baked shortbread also freezes for 3 months in a rigid box, layered with paper; thaw it in the box at room temperature so condensation forms outside rather than on the biscuit. Ground hazelnuts, being 60 percent fat, go rancid faster than the biscuit does: grind them on the day.
What to serve with it
Tea, strong and plain, or coffee. Shortbread is a vehicle for butter and it wants a bitter drink beside it, not a sweet one. The other classic partner is fruit with acid in it — a spoonful of marionberries or raspberries crushed with a little sugar, or a glass of something cold and sharp — which does the same job from the other direction.
If you are serving it as a dessert rather than with a drink, two fingers of shortbread beside a bowl of berries and unsweetened cream is the whole dish, and it is a better use of good hazelnuts than any iced cake.
From the recipe box / Oregon
Hazelnut Shortbread
Butter, sugar, flour and a quarter of the flour's weight in toasted Willamette Valley hazelnuts, pressed into a tin and baked slow and pale — a Scottish biscuit carrying the one nut Oregon grows almost all of, with the quantities worked out for this page.
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 50 min
- Total
- 2 hr 15 min
- Serves
- 16
- Calories
- 220 per serving
Instructions
- Toast the hazelnuts at 350 °F for 10 to 12 minutes, rub them in a towel to take off what pellicle will come off, and cool them completely.
- Pulse the cooled nuts with the tablespoon of sugar to a coarse meal, stopping well short of a paste.
- Beat the butter with the remaining sugar and the salt just until smooth, without letting it go pale and fluffy.
- Work in the flour and ground nuts until uniform, press the dough into an 8-inch square or 9-inch round tin, prick it all over and score 16 pieces.
- Bake at 325 °F for 40 to 50 minutes, until the surface is matt and only the edges have coloured.
- Cut through the scored lines within three minutes of taking it out, then leave it in the tin until completely cold.
Nutrition
| Fat | 15 g (8 g saturated) |
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| Sodium | 75 mg |
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| Protein | 2 g |
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| Serving | one of 16 fingers |
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| Calories | 220 |
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| Cholesterol | 31 mg |
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| Carbohydrates | 20 g (7 g sugar, 1 g fiber) |
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Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as
a courtesy, not as dietary advice.
Questions readers ask
Do I have to skin the nuts?
Get what comes off and stop. The Oregon bulletin says of the state's principal variety that the pellicle is "very difficult to remove completely, even after roasting", which is a state horticulturist telling you not to bother chasing the last of it. Toast, rub in a towel, lift the nuts out and leave the loose skins behind. If you want a pale, clean crumb, buy blanched kernels instead — they are nutritionally the same thing and save the step.
Filberts or hazelnuts — which is right?
Both, and the documents say so. OSU's own extension titles change under the same authors, from "Growing Filberts in Oregon" in October 1969 to "Growing Hazelnuts in Oregon" in May 1985, and the 1985 bulletin explains the split: "Although growers in Oregon usually call them filberts, most customers know them as hazelnuts." The federal marketing order simply uses both words for one nut, defining hazelnuts as "hazelnuts or filberts produced in the States of Oregon and Washington from trees of the genus Corylus". The federal grade standards for the nut in the shell are still filed under filberts.
Can I use a food processor for the whole dough?
You can, and it is quicker, but it is also how most shortbread gets ruined. The processor overworks the butter and heats it, and the dough comes out smooth and slightly greasy rather than crumbly. If you use one, pulse the butter and sugar together in short bursts, add the dry ingredients and stop while the mixture still looks like coarse meal, then press it into the tin and let it rest 30 minutes in the fridge.
Why bake it at such a low temperature for so long?
Because the job is drying rather than browning. Shortbread has no leavening and no liquid beyond the water in the butter, so what the oven does is drive that water off slowly and set the starch without colouring the sugar or the butter solids. At 400 °F the edges are brown before the middle is dry, and a shortbread that is not dry in the middle goes soft within a day. Pale, matt and dry all the way through is the whole target.