Foto Friday: recipe revisionism EXPOSED! 11 November 2011 2:52 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,baking,consumerism,cookies,diet stress is a health hazard,food snobbery,geekery,photos,pictures,random,recipes,seasonality , trackbackJust one picture today, readers, but it is a doozy! Check this out:
Oatmeal cookie recipe revisionism — EXPOSED!
Do you know what this means, readers? DO YOU?
The new recipe, the one on top, has 2 TB less butter and 1/4 cup less brown sugar. You can’t see it in that first picture, but if you click through to the larger Flickr version of the picture below, you’ll see that both recipes claim to make “about 4 dozen” cookies (not that I’ve ever successfully gotten that many out of a batch of dough, mind you; they’d have to be very small cookies and I’d have to stop eating the fresh-baked ones long enough to get an accurate count — when I blogged the old oatmeal cookie recipe back in 2008, I said it made more like 3 dozen, so YMMV):
Ok, I lied about just one picture, but I couldn’t make this one look good on Instagram, so I took that other; the recipe on the right is the new version.
So. According to the packages of butter in my fridge (salted and unsalted, gotta have both kinds), 1 TB butter ≈ 100 calories, and according to Wikipedia it’s kind of tricksy to guess how many calories are in a given amount of brown sugar by volume, depending on how tightly it’s packed into a measuring device. My trusty and beloved copy of Baking Illustrated
2 x 100 + 2 x 200 = 600
600 fewer calories in the new batch of dough, divided by 48 cookies, or 12.5 fewer calories per cookie than in the old recipe (more if you make bigger cookies, fewer if your cookies are somehow even more pathetically small than the recipe suggests — and in case you think I’m being silly about this whole cookie size thing, Baking Illustrated‘s recipe uses the same amount of flour and oats, and more sugar, and claims to make dough for 18 cookies, so there).
Anyway. My point is, of course I can’t prove there’s a conspiracy afoot and recipe updates aren’t particularly scandalous either way, or I’d have to go on some sort of rant about how apparently it’s not enough for Quaker Oats to advertise its heart-healthiness and magical fiber and whatnot all over the package, now they gotta go mucking with their cookie recipe to healthwash it? What? Boo! They’re cookies, for monkeys’ sake! They’re not supposed to be health food! And cutting butter and brown sugar will make them less wonderfully chewy! Which maybe is also the point: if the cookies are less delicious, people will eat fewer of them, and thus consume fewer calories from sugar and buttery, buttery fat…
…but c’mon. I for one still have some joy left in my heart, and anyway as you can see from that second picture I kinda ripped the lid on the new package of oats, so I ended up keeping the old lid with the more caloriffic recipe. My oatmeal raisin cookie-making will remain the same as it ever was, which is to say: delicious.
