On NPR’s website, specifically the SALT column, they have touched upon the science behind making the great American Cookie. What we call informally The Chocolate Chipper.
Without a doubt this classic cookie- the chocolate chip, is our biggest selling cookie. I can’t even imagine how many we have baked in the past 13 years our ovens have been going.
But wait, let’s do some math so I can imagine. I could very safely say that we sell at least 140 or so a week and that is probably pretty conservative when not counting special orders, the extras we make for the NFM and such. But let’s just say 140 for the sake of simple calculating. So multiply 140 a week by 52 weeks a year by 13 years you get the number 94,640 chocolate chip cookies baked.
So I guess I know a bit about baking cookies. We follow a specific recipe that has changed very little in the 13 years that we have been baking them. And even when following the recipe, as you all can probably guess, there have always been differences in how the cookie comes out of the oven. Maybe the cookie spreads a bit more, or maybe it has crunchy edges, or maybe it doesn’t spread at all and just sits there and bakes in a little blob.
I have seen all these permutations and more in my time in front of the ovens and that is once again why I enjoy being a baker.
You can seemingly do the same thing and follow the same recipe and still get slightly different results. The goal to achieve consistent results can go astray for a number of different reasons – the dough was over mixed, the butter too soft, the oven too hot, the oven not hot enough, the dough too warm, too cold, an apprentice mixed the dough and it was their first time, the cookies were baked on tuesday, it was the vernal equinox, I was in a bad mood, I was in a good mood, etc, etc.
The beauty is the cookie for most part still tastes great albeit maybe in a form that might not appeal to one customer but another. I’ll use my friend, Ray the farmer, as an example. He and his family love our Chocolate Chippers but he especially loves the ones that have the melted butter crunchy edges. For me that is an imperfect cookie – one that is flawed and not how it should be. But for him it is perfect.
The NPR article talks about what to do differently to change your favorite recipe to achieve the results you want. Cookie science in action – pretty cool, huh? I’m looking forward to baking off a few dozen tomorrow!
