Palets bretons are thick salted-butter shortbread discs, crisp at the edge and sandy at the centre, baked in a ring so they rise straight rather than spread.
The biscuit belongs to the same family as the flatter, wider sablé breton, and the two names are used loosely across Brittany, but the palet is by convention the thicker one, at least a centimetre deep. Both descend from the region's habit of baking with salted butter in quantities that would be unusual anywhere else in France, and both were sold from the late nineteenth century onwards by the Breton biscuit factories at Pont-Aven, Quimper and Saint-Michel-Chef-Chef. The fleur de sel and the yolks are what separate a palet from a British shortbread: it is saltier, richer and shorter, and it crumbles rather than snaps.
