To add still more height to your already thick cookie, pretend baking guy Onofre set the oven a little too high that night, and turn the heat up to 400. This will firm the egg proteins on the outside of the dough ball faster, and bring spreading to a halt that much sooner. Of course […]
READ ONThis is a style of chocolate chip cookie most commonly produced at small, boutique bakeries, for reasons that have less to do with aesthetics than the way their operations run. That is to say, in bake shops you have people who mix dough, other people who handle dough and still others who bake dough — […]
READ ONDiscovered this one in my box when I got up this morning: Dear Joe, Why is it you say that high-fat chocolates are of “higher quality” when there are many very high quality high-cacao chocolates on the market today? Perhaps I should make a distinction here, since it’s true that a great many high-cacao chocolates […]
READ ONMy mailbox is often a little too eager to delete messages, so I don’t have the text of an excellent question that was sent in on Wednesday. It was basically this: why, once chocolate chips are baked (as in chocolate chip cookies) do they not firm up again completely? Logic seems to dictate, after all, […]
READ ONMaking a chewy chocolate chip cookie is mostly about adding more activated gluten. So, if you want your cookies still chewier, make them with bread flour instead of the normal all-purpose. Increasing the proportion of brown sugar vis-à-vis white sugar will also add chew (plus an even deeper, richer flavor). Why? Well, molasses is gunky […]
READ ONHow do you show “chewy” in a photograph? I dunno. You’ll just have to trust me on this. The chewy chocolate chip cookie is probably the one I received the most requests for, and for good reason. Lots of chewing means more time to savor the chocolate-y, buttery, brown sugary glory that is Wakefield’s masterpiece. […]
READ ONMy good friend Gerhard writes in again to invite me to write what could be a very long and windy post indeed (even for me): Can I inspire you for a post about different kinds of chocolates and which one shall be used for what purpose in baking? That is if you haven’t written one […]
READ ONAccording to legend, Mrs. Wakefield was making her favorite classic cookie, the “Butter Drop Do” when fate intervened and the Toll House Crunch was invented. So the story goes, she normally put Baker’s chocolate in her Butter Drop Do’s, which, so the tale would have us believe, melted completely into the batter during baking. This […]
READ ONTo achieve thinner cookies than I’ve done, melt the butter completely before adding it to the sugar mix. Then drop the oven temperature by about 25 degrees Fahrenheit to encourage melting and spreading before the egg proteins firm up. A higher fat European butter has a sharper melting point, and is a sure-fire way to […]
READ ONHere’s a variety that a lot of die-hard chocolate chip cookie lovers can’t live without: a thinnish, deeply caramelized cookie that goes crunch when you bite it. Delicious as it is, it certainly deviates from the Platonic ideal of the chocolate chip cookie as pictured on the Nestlé web site. The question is: what series […]
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