Matthew - 20 August 2012 01:36 PM
So Charles, what were the results of all of your testing? Do you have a go-to version now?
The actual goal that I had was to recreate the perfect CC cookie that I had made years ago, the one where I used the fake butter sticks. Those cookies shattered lightly in the mouth when bitten, something due to a lot of empty space on the inside of the cookie, which had an irregular, bumpy surface. Shortly after making them, I discovered the virtues of using butter, and I’ve never been able to make their equal again. I’m not absolutely certain there is a causal relationship, but it’s plausible.
I normally use the recipe from King Arthur’s Cookie book. It’s more weighted towards brown sugar than the Toll House recipe, uses 1 fewer egg, specifies half butter/half shortening, and they throw in a little vinegar, but I’m not sure that this really impacts the final product that much. The cookies turn out very flat and crisp, and people seem to like that a lot.
A few years ago, I took two batches of cookies to a friend to evaluate. One was a medium size, thin cookie and the other was a small, thicker cookie. My friend loved the smaller cookie and exclaimed about how it shattered in the mouth like the one I was trying to replicate and he demanded to know how the small cookie differed from the larger cookie. “It’s smaller,” I deadpanned. And that was the sole difference; they’d come from the same bowl of dough, I just used the small cookie scoop vs the big one, and that was enough to produce a significant texture difference.
I had to give up my experiments because I changed jobs and couldn’t take them into work any more (office too small).
Still, it was a good learning experience. Interestingly, many professional bakers, when trying to derive their own recipes, go back to Ruth Wakefield’s original Toll House recipe and end up making only small modifications to it.
