I’m definitely in the salty camp. Chips over cookies any day. Nuts before chocolate. Cheese plate instead of dessert. Salt reigns over sugar on my palate.

I also can’t resist a good salty-sweet combination. Salted caramel. Aged cheddar with apple pie. Prosciutto and melon. That, in part, is due to my upbringing on Cantonese cuisine where there are plenty of dishes with a good dose of sweetness to counterpoint salty, savoury flavours. At dim sum, we didn’t wait to eat our egg tarts for dessert. We ate them between bites of siu mai and chicken feet.

Saveur recently posted a list of 5 unsung pastries in NY. One of them piqued my savoury-sweet interest: a cured olive cookie from Abraço. Since I don’t have the good fortune of flying out to NY to sample them myself, I had to make them. I adapted this recipe for scourtins from 101 Cookbooks. I substituted about a 1/4 of the all purpose flour with whole wheat flour and subbed about 1/4 of the icing sugar with granulated sugar for a more rustic cookie. I also rolled them extra thin for extra crispness and sprinkled them with panela and a wee bit of fine sea salt.

Les scourtins aux olives

Salty, sweet, umami, crispy, crunchy and just a little chew. These are begging for nice rosé on the patio for happy hour. Maybe next weekend.