TracyFood

So. About those cookies. (Hi Cj!) 29 January 2008 7:26 am

Posted by Tracy in : pictures, chocolate, America's Test Kitchen, baking, dessert, friends, vegetarian, cooking , trackback

This post is dedicated to Cj for her enthusiasm for chocolatey goodness, both vegan and non. My most recent forays into cookieliciousness fall into the latter category: Alton Brown and America’s Test Kitchen both agree that melted butter is the way to chewy cookie goodness, and after the results of my most recent experiments in that field, I am not about to argue.

I used the recipe for chewy chocolate chip cookies in The New Best Recipe, which turns out to be identical to the one in Alton’s “Three Chips for Sister Marsha” episode: there’s an egg to separate, but it’s worth it, oh yes. Then I pondered ATK’s very specific instructions on how to shape the cookies, and decided to try an experiment:

Same batter, different shaping techniques. What difference does it make?

The cookies on top were formed by scooping big tablespoons of batter and forming those into smooth balls, which I then flattened out as neatly as I could on the cookie sheet. The ones below were formed by taking heaping tablespoon-sized balls of batter, splitting them in half, turning the craggy broken side up, and smooshing the halves back together for craggy-topped goodness. That second technique is the one ATK insisted on for optimal results… and wouldn’t you just know it, they’re absolutely right. Here’s how the neatly formed cookies baked up:

and it’s pretty gorgeous, don’t get me wrong. But here’s the post-bake results for cookies formed by the crazy split-turn-smoosh method:

Oh man. We are talking like the Platonic ideal of chewy chocolate-chip cookies here, friends. Not only are they beautifully imperfect like you want homemade to be, they’re somehow even thicker and chewier than cookies formed by the traditional two-spoons approach. (Yes, I did a control batch, because science rules, but I didn’t get pictures because by the time those came out of the oven I was already in chocolate-chip nirvana. You know how it is.)

Conclusion: the crazy split-turn-smoosh method really does make thicker, chewier cookies, but spoon-drop is okay in a pinch; smoothing out the scoops of batter makes uniform cookies but they’re perilously close to crisp (for which there are recipes, so freaking use them and don’not the ones for chewy goodness). Really, what I’m trying to say is: Yay for cookies!