Making 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 […]
READ ONChocolate chips haven’t always been around, you know (though they’re such an American staple, many of us assume they have been). Ruth Wakefield cut/broke bars of chocolate into pieces to make her original cookies. Once the chocolate chip cookie became popular in the mid-1930’s, most home bakers continued to do just that. Fully aware that […]
READ ONAs if on cue, my good friend Gerhard writes in from Vienna to say: I have one question about the cookie recipe… it features baking soda, but no acids (like vinegar, lemon juice, sour milk products etc.blablablah). How will that one work… you write that brown sugar is acidic? btw: Chocolate Chips are unknown here. […]
READ ONThe chocolate chip cookie is one of the few examples of American bakery that has earned at least some measure of respect on the Continent. Visit one of the more bourgeois bake shops of Paris or Amsterdam and you’re likely to find a small American ghetto section — often stuffed into a far corner — […]
READ ONThis is one small corner of food history where everybody tells pretty much the same story (which is actually quite refreshing). It goes like this: the chocolate chip cookie was invented by Ruth Wakefield, who, along with her husband, owned an historic establishment called the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusettes. A studied cook and […]
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