This recipe uses our Organic Solina Heritage White Flour , a soft wheat grown by a group of farmers in Abruzzo, close to Santo Stefano di Sessanio. Solina can be considered a true landrace wheat and is in the Italian Slow Food Foundation for biodiversity.

While this flour can be used for making bread and pasta, its naturally full flavour is also beautiful in these lemony butter shortbreads. If you don’t have preserved lemons, just use the zest of an extra half lemon instead. We were inspired by Alison Roman to add preserved lemons as well as lemon zest to the dough, and love the extra citrus punch it adds.

Makes 8 triangles of shortbread.

Ingredients

•  80g golden caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
• 100g chilled butter, cut into rough 1cm cubes
• Zest of one lemon
• ½ a preserved lemon, very finely chopped
• Generous pinch of salt
• Generous grating of dried vanilla bean
• 180g white solina flour

Method

Preheat your oven to 150C. Line a loose bottom tart tin or round cake tin with baking parchment, or grease with butter to prevent sticking.

Beat the sugar and butter until light and fluffy using an electric hand whisk or stand mixer. Add the lemon zest, preserved lemon, salt and grated dried vanilla bean and combine.

Beating at a low speed, slowly add the flour, until thoroughly combined. It will create quite a short dough.

Use your hands to push and spread the dough into the tin until it evenly fills the base, patting it down with your hands. Don’t worry if it cracks a bit, just push it back together until it reaches the edges evenly. Flatten it with the palms of your hands so the top is roughly even.

Sprinkle plenty of extra caster sugar on top and prick over the top with a fork.

Bake for 35-40 minutes until pale yellow gold. Leave it to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Store in an airtight container in a cool, dry place.