What is your favorite cookie?
Chocolate chip cookies are far and away America's favorite cookie. This should come as no surprise to anyone who enjoys the tasty treat. More than 53% of American adults prefer the cookies over the next most popular kind, peanut butter. Peanut butter cookies are the preferred cookie for about 16% of then nation, while about 15% of people like oatmeal cookies the best.
What is your favorite cookie?
Chocolate Chip
Peanut Butter
Oatmeal
Sugar
When it comes to home baked cookies what makes some turn out flat and crisp as opposed to others that come out moist and fluffy. How you like your cookies is a matter of preference, or maybe you are nostalgic for how your mom made them when you were growing up. Did you know that in most cases, you have control over how they turn out!
Because they are an American Favorite let's discuss Chocolate Chip Cookies and do a crash course in cookieology - yes it is a real science!!
Basically, cookie dough is a combination of fat, sugar, flour, leavening and moisture, such as egg. Changing the proportion of any basic ingredient also changes the texture of the dough and changes the cookie’s character.
Butter, margarine or shortening: All cookies begin with some type of fat. Recipes usually call for butter, unsalted butter, margarine, solid shortening or lard. Generally, all are interchangeable. However, each produces slightly different results.
Butter improves a cookie’s flavor. The cookies are thinner and can have a crispy exterior and chewy interior. All-butter cookies are more likely to burn than those made with margarine.
Margarine improves its texture, but doesn't add as much flavor.
Solid shortening creates soft, spongy cookies that stay soft for a long time but have little taste.
Lard creates flaky, slightly dry-textured cookies. For a delicious Chocolate Chip Cookie, a combination of butter and margarine produces the best flavor and texture. Half butter, half margarine is a good starting point. Next time you may want to go 3/4 - 1/4. Once you find your perfect combination write it down to pass along for generations to come.
Brown Butter - browning the butter and letting it cool back to a semi solid state adds a rich, nutty flavor to your cookies and is by far my favorite method of baking Chocolate Chip Cookies. Check out this recipe for Salted Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies!!
Most recipes begin with instructions to cream softened butter, margarine or shortening. This softens it and beats in air. The more air beaten into the fat, the lighter and fluffier the cookie will be. However, do not overbeat. If the fat becomes too warm and soft, the dough loses its airiness and becomes greasy. The baked cookies are flat and flabby. Trick is to begin with softened but chilled fat and only beat until mixture becomes creamy. Do not use whipped or diet margarine/butter or liquid oil unless the recipe specifically calls for it. You will end up with flat cookies with no texture.
Sugar and other sweeteners: Sugar sweetens the dough and makes it tender. However, adding more sugar than a recipe calls for creates cookies that are brittle and glassy around the edges. All sweeteners should be creamed with the fat in order to dissolve the sugar. Most cookies call for white sugar.
Light or dark brown sugar can be substituted in most recipes. These will give the cookies a slightly richer flavor, darker color and moister texture.
Honey, maple syrup or molasses can be used alone or in conjunction with white or brown sugar. Honey has a distinctive flavor and creates a chewy, moist texture. When substituting honey for sugar, use one-third less honey and cut back on other liquids in the recipe.
Molasses has a strong flavor, which is usually better tempered with other sweeteners.
Maple syrup produces a chewy cookie with a crisp exterior and adds a warm maple undertone of flavor.
If using a sugar substitute look for a recipe that specifically calls for a sugar substitute. Not all recipes fare well with a sugar substitute. Eggs: The protein and moisture in eggs binds the dough together and acts as a secondary leavening agent. The more egg a recipe calls for the lighter and more cakelike they tend to be. Those with little to no egg such as a shortbread cookie then to be crispy and fragile. I usually with lightly whisk room temperature the eggs prior to adding to the butter and sugar mixture and then add them slowly to keep the creamed mixture fluffy and to beat in air.
Leavening: In most cookie recipes, baking powder or baking soda provide puffiness.
Baking powder is the most common leavening. It contains cream of tartar, bicarbonate of soda and salt. It starts to react as soon as it comes in contact with moisture, although the majority of the leavening action occurs in heat. This double-action ensures that baking powder is effective even if the cookies aren’t baked immediately. Baking-powder doughs can be refrigerated or frozen.
Some recipes call for a small amount of baking soda in addition to baking powder. However, baking soda starts to produce gas as soon as it is wet, so baking-soda cookies should be baked immediately.
Flour: Flour is the foundation of the cookie, but cookies with too much flour have a pasty taste and a tough, dry texture. Most chocolate chip cookie recipes call for all-purpose flour, which is a mixture of soft, low- gluten wheat and hard, high-gluten wheat. The combination gives the flour just enough gluten to produce light, tender cookies without making them elastic like bread.
Flour should be added last and mixed as little as possible.
The flour should be carefully measured. For accuracy, spoon flour lightly into the appropriate-sized measuring cup and scrape away the excess with the back of a knife.
Flavorings: Chocolate Chips, optional nuts and vanilla Generally, doughs with vanilla, nuts, chips and chunks should be refrigerated after they’re mixed. The cookies hold their shapes better and the dough doesn’t become overmixed.
A twist on the Classic - Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies. These are crowd pleaser for everyone that loves Chocolate and Peanut Butter!!
FUN FACTS:
The Chocolate Chip Cookie was created by mistake!! Much like the discovery of penicillin, the chocolate chip cookie was created by a happy accident. Ruth Wakefied was an in keeper in Whitman, Massachusetts. One evening in the early 1930s, she added chocolate bits to her cookie batter because she assumed the chocolate would melt. The chocolate bits did not, and the iconic cookie was born. The owners of the Toll House Inn, where Wakefield worked later, claimed that they created the cookie. There is also an urban legend that Neiman Marcus was the true originator of the treat.
Their first name was "Butterdrop Do Cookies" Cookies are named by the way they are made, The different methods for making cookies are drop, molded, refrigerated, rolled, pressed and in bars. While Wakefield first ran her recipe for the cookies in a newspaper in the Boston area, she also published a cookbook in 1936. Named after the inn that she ran, "Toll House Tried and True Recipes" ran her recipe for chocolate chip cookies under her second name for the treat,"Chocolate Crunch Cookies." Nestle gave Wakefield a lifetime supply of chocolate for her creation. The chocolate company bought the cookie recipe from Wakeful in the late 1930s, and paid her with a lifetime supply of chocolate. In 1939, they introduced their version of the cookie, which is the now well known tear drop version.
The early chocolate chip cookies were small and very crispy Early chocolate chip cookies were the size of a quarter and eaten in one bite.
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