Bouchon Bakery’s Pecan Sandies

This past summer, I spent a week in the Napa Valley/San Francisco area. This meant I had to make multiple “obligatory” stops at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery. Having loved this bakery so much, my sister (Codename: DSN Engineer) bought me the Bouchon Bakery cookbook! My first inclination was to recreate the bakery’s French macaroons I had so greedily eaten during my time in Napa. But, when I was flipping through the opening pages, I noticed Keller had included a recipe for pecan sandies. What was intriguing about the recipe was not only its simplicity and tasty results, but where the recipe itself was located. Not in the cookie section with the rest, but at the beginning in the introduction as an homage to his mother who loved the sandy-textured cookies. I thought that was great, especially since I’m a nerd who reads “new” cookbooks from front to back like they’re regular novels or something.

Anyway, these cookies are really delicious if you’re a pecan sandie fan. However, they’re even better than the store-bought version, which tends to have a sugar-scrub, grainy texture that will surely scrape the roof of your mouth after one cookie. These Bouchon Bakery cookies have an extremely fine sugar texture, due mainly to the powdered sugar used in the recipe. In comparison to the store-bought, these cookies are downright “smooth”, considering they’re “sandies”. These cookies are already a favorite of mine. Everything else in the cookbook is just a bonus to me at this point. Find the recipe here.