If your cookies never turn out perfect, understanding their chemistry may help improve your technique. Follow this classic chocolate chip cookie recipe and learn about the ingredients and the reactions that occur throughout the mixing and baking process. If the ingredients are high quality, measured carefully, and mixed as they should be, chemical magic happens in the oven to make great cookies. Heating sodium bicarbonate causes it to decompose into water and carbon dioxide :.
Carbon dioxide gas and water vapor form the bubbles which make cookies rise. Rising doesn't just make cookies taller. It also opens up space to keep the cookie from becoming too dense. Salt slows down the decomposition of baking soda , so the bubbles don't get too big. This could lead to weak cookies or to cookies that fall flat when they come out of the oven. The heat works on the butter, egg yolk, and flour to change the shape of the molecules. The gluten in the flour forms a polymer mesh that works with the albumin protein from the egg white and the emulsifier lecithin from the egg yolk to form the dough and support the bubbles.
Heat breaks the sucrose into the simple sugars glucose and fructose, giving each cookie a shiny, light brown crust. When you take the cookies out of the oven, the hot water gases in the cookie contract. For the best results, use pure cane sugar because products that contain both beet and cane sugars tend to be less consistent in quality. Brown sugar makes cookies moister and chewier than does white sugar. Shortening and butter make cookies tender.
When mixed into flour, fat coats some of the flour and protects it from the liquid in some recipes. This prevents gluten from developing, making the cookies more tender and less chewy.
Butter contributes significant flavor, so substituting shortening or margarine for butter or vice versa changes the taste. It can also affect the texture of a cookie. Butter has a lower melting point than shortening or margarine, causing it to spread more during baking, so a cookie made with butter will be thinner and crisper than the same cookie made with shortening or margarine. Changing the type of butter can also make a difference. Premium European-style butter is higher in butter fat and lower in moisture than regular butter, making cookies a little thinner, crumblier, crisper, and more butterytasting.
As for salted vs. These are a major source of moisture and protein in cookie dough. The liquid in eggs gives a cookie structure by bonding with the starch and protein in the flour, and their protein helps to make cookies chewy. Most cookie recipes call for large eggs. It does so by neutralizing acidic ingredients in dough, such as brown sugar, honey, vanilla, and butter, which would normally inhibit browning. Sometimes baking powder, which is a mixture of baking soda and an acidic ingredient, most commonly calcium phosphate, is added instead of baking soda to give cookies a light, cakey texture.
When moistened and heated, the alkali and acid in baking powder react, neutralizing each another and giving off carbon dioxide gas, which aerates the dough, making the finished cookie puffier. Without this flavor enhancer, the secondary flavors in a cookie fall flat as the sweetness takes over. Salt also strengthens the protein in a dough, making cookies chewier.
Kosher salt and table salt are identical in flavor, so you can use them interchangeably if you adjust for volume differences. Kosher salt is coarse and table salt is fine, so the same weight of kosher salt takes up more space.
To substitute kosher salt for table salt, use double the volume to match the saltiness of the table salt.
Understanding how all of these ingredients work together can help you improve or even fix a cookie recipe when things go wrong. To see several practical examples of this knowledge in action, see our Test Kitchen piece on cookie troubleshooting. Mixing Mixing develops gluten in the dough, giving cookies a chewy consistency.
I'm sorry, what was that dear? That's odd , I thought to myself. Why would she be saying that? Wouldn't anyone be pleased to be married to someone who fills the house with the aroma of warm butter, caramelized sugar, and gooey chocolate?
Indeed, wouldn't any human being in the right mind yearn to be constantly surrounded by sweet, crisp-and-chewy snacks? Then, as I glanced around the apartment, wiping chocolate-specked hands against my apron, running a finger across the countertop and tracing a line into the dusting of white powder that coated every surface in the kitchen, eyeing the dozens of bags of failed experimental cookies that blocked the television, opening the refrigerator door to discover that more than half of its contents were batches of uncooked cookie dough in various stages of rest, I thought, maybe she does have a point.
For the past few months, I've had chocolate chip cookies on the brain. I wake up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea, a new test to run, only to discover that my pound flour bin has been emptied for the third time. Did I really use it all up that fast? I'd put on my coat and walk out in the cold New York winter night, my sandals leaving tracks in the snow as I wander the neighborhood, searching for a convenience store that will sell me flour at three in the morning.
You see, I've never been able to get a chocolate chip cookie exactly the way I like. Stella has developed amazing recipes for quick and easy chocolate chip cookies , thick and chunky Levain-style chocolate chip cookies , and thin and crispy Tate's-style chocolate chip cookies. But I'm talking about chocolate chip cookies that are barely crisp around the edges with a buttery, toffee-like crunch that transitions into a chewy, moist center that bends like caramel, rich with butter and big pockets of melted chocolate.
Cookies with crackly, craggy tops and the complex aroma of butterscotch. And of course, that elusive perfect balance between sweet and salty. Some have come close, but none have quite hit the mark.
And the bigger problem? I was never sure what to change in order to get what I wanted. Cookies are fickle and the advice out there is conflicting. Does more sugar make for crisper cookies?
What about brown versus white? Does it matter how I incorporate the chocolate chips or whether the flour is blended in or folded? How about the butter: cold, warm, or melted? I made it my goal to test each and every element, from ingredients to cooking process, leaving no chocolate chip unturned in my quest for the best. Most traditional chocolate chip cookie recipes start with the same basic ingredients and technique: butter and a mix of granulated and brown sugar are creamed together with a touch of vanilla until fluffy, eggs are beaten in one at a time, followed by flour, salt, and some sort of chemical leavening agent baking soda, baking powder, or a bit of both.
The mixture is combined just until it comes together, then spooned onto a baking sheet and baked. When you bake a cookie, here's what's going on, step-by-step:. It's a simple technique that hides more complicated processes underneath. So how do you decipher what's going on? My first course of action was to test out these basic ingredients one at a time in order to determine how they affect the final outcome. Butter is where most recipes begin, and it provides several things to the mix. First, butter keeps cookies tender.
When flour is mixed with water such as the water found in eggs , it develops gluten, a tough, stretchy network of interconnected proteins that set up as they bake. Gluten can't form in fat, thus butter will inhibit its overall formation, leading to more tender results. The higher the proportion of butter to other ingredients, the more tender your cookie will be and consequently, the more it will spread as it bakes.
I found that a ratio of 1 part flour to 1 part sugar to 0. Because of shortening's different melting qualities and the fact that it has no water content , shortening-based cookies come out softer but more dense than those made with butter.
How butter is incorporated can also affect texture. In the early creaming stages of making a cookie, cool butter is beaten until it's light and fluffy. During the process, some air is incorporated and some of the sugar dissolves in the butter's water phase.
This air in turn helps leaven the cookies as they bake, giving them some lift. Melting butter before combining it with sugar and eggs leads to squatter, denser cookies.
Butter is essential for flavor. Substituting butter with a less flavorful fat like shortening or margarine yielded sub-par cookies. These proteins brown as the cookie bakes, adding nuttiness and butterscotch notes to the final flavor of cookies. I asked myself: if browning milk proteins provide extra flavor to cookies, how could I boost that flavor even more?
My friend Charles Kelsey, the man behind the fantastic Brookline, MA sandwich shop Cutty's, developed a simple chocolate chip cookie recipe for Cook's Illustrated magazine back in In his recipe, he made the ingenious discovery that browning the butter before adding it to the mixture would give the cookies a much more pronounced nuttiness. But this created some other problems. Since the butter can't get hot enough to brown milk proteins until all of its water content has evaporated, brown butter adds no moisture to dough.
This produces a couple of interesting results. Without water, sugar that is mixed into browned butter cannot dissolve sugar molecules are highly hydrophilic and will dissolve readily in water, but not in fat , which makes it subsequently more difficult for them to melt into each other as the cookie bakes. The cookies ended up missing out on some of that caramelized toffee flavor I was after.
With less water, you also end up with less gluten development, thus a cookie made with browned butter is softer and more tender than one made with creamed or plain melted butter. Soft and chewy is good, but I wanted a slightly better balance. So how do I get the flavor benefits of browned butter while still allowing for sugar to dissolve and caramelize properly? The answer turned out to be in the eggs.
Before we jump to the solution, let's take a quick look at what eggs have to offer in a cookie. Egg whites provide a good amount of water, as well as protein.
Egg proteins are particularly good at trapping and retaining bubbles of air or water vapor. The higher the proportion of egg white in a cookie, the more it rises during baking.
Because of the extra water, you also get more gluten formation, which again leads to a taller cookie provided you use enough flour to absorb that extra water. Other than the small amount in the butter, eggs are the main source of water in a cookie dough recipe. Egg yolks also provide some moisture and protein, but more importantly they provide a well-emulsified source of fat. When cooked, egg yolk forms a tender protein coagulum that can keep cookies tender and fudge-like.
A high proportion of egg yolk leads to a more brownie-like texture in a finished cookie. By keeping the total mass of egg added to a dough the same but altering the proportion of white to yolk, you can achieve a variety of textures. Two whites and a yolk, for instance, produces the more open structure of the top cookie in the photo above, while three yolks and no whites produces the denser, fudgier texture of the cookie on the bottom.
Turns out that the combination I like best is actually a 1 to 1 ratio of egg whites to egg yolks, which conveniently is exactly how eggs naturally come. Ain't that something? Going back to my initial problem of wanting the flavor of browned butter but disliking the way it prevented sugar from properly dissolving, I asked myself, what if I were to flip the script for these cookies: instead of creaming sugar and butter and adding eggs, why not beat together the eggs and sugar then add the butter?
Watch Video. Prep 15 min Total 1 hr 30 min Servings Ready to Make? By Betty Crocker Kitchens. Make With.
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