October 28, 2007...11:32 am
Chocolate Chip Cookies a la Anna Olson
I loooooooove chocolate chip cookies. The problem is that baking… Well, I like baking, but baking doesn’t like me. I always find a way to mess things up a bit.
So while I was intrigued by this month’s Foodtv.ca Recipe Challenge, I was leery to actually attempt the recipe. But a boring afternoon finally prompted me to give it a try.
One of my peeves are chocolate chip cookies that start out chewy when they’re fresh from the oven, but which turn into little bricks after they’ve cooled and been stored for a few days. This recipe, which calls for corn starch, promised chewy centered cookies. Another peeve/issue I have is burning. Usually my cookies either end up burned on the bottom no matter how I adjust racks and baking times. I think it might be our cookie sheets, but even new sheets didn’t solve that problem. I’ve started using a silicone baking mat, which has almost eliminated the burning problem, but cookies that were meant to “spread” - like chocolate chip - don’t. I can live with that.
As I usually do when baking, I followed the recipe to a “t.” The only change I made was to the chocolate. Rather than chopping up a bar of bittersweet chocolate, I used 60% cacao dark chocolate chips instead. As a lot of other people trying the recipe found, I needed to bake them for a bit longer than the recipe called for: I left them in for about 12-14 minutes, rather than the 8-10 that the recipe called for. And, because I used the silocone baking mat, they didn’t spread out at all. It was only once they were on the baking rack cooling that they slowly turned from rounded dough-shapes into cookies. Odd. But I decided to turn that into a plus, since I was able to stick toothpicks into them to test if they were done.
The result: chewy delicious cookies. Even after they’ve been stored for almost a week in a cookie tin, they are still chewy and not crumbly at all. Success! I’ll be putting this recipe into my cookie cookbook for reference when Christmas rolls around. My one complaint - which probably shouldn’t even be a complaint at all - is that I can only have one or two at a time. These are heavy cookies. One fills me up in a way that a handful of my old cookies wouldn’t. I’m going to mark that up as a success, too… These cookies have built-in portion control. You can only have one!
3 Comments
October 28, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Whether the cookies spread or not is more a function of ingredients then cooking surface. For a wonderful dissection of each ingredient in a standard chocolate chip cookie recipe and its role on the finished product, I highly recommend Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise.
The short version:
High-protein flour - darker in color and more flat
Low-protein flour - pale, soft, and puffy
Fat with sharp melting point, like butter - cookies spread more
Fat that maintains the same consistency over a wide temperature range - cookies spread less
Reduced fat spreads - cookies are browner
Brown sugar and honey (hygroscopic sweeteners) - cookies soften on standing
Baking soda - cookies are browner
Corriher’s advice (as consultant to the Food Network’s “Good Eats”) led to my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, Alton Brown’s “The Chewy” cookie.
October 30, 2007 at 10:23 am
Hmm, interesting. I’m trying to synch that with what I’ve experienced. We have never changed our flour or our butter, but I noticed a distinct change in how cookies baked on the silicone.
…maybe it was just because they don’t burn quite as often. >.<
October 31, 2007 at 9:08 am
Thanks for the info.
I also hate it when chocolate chip cookies cool and turn into gravel.
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