Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  Brown sugar is mostly crystallized sucrose, but also contains a good amount of glucose and fructose, along with trace minerals that give it its flavor and a slightly acidic pH. Glucose and fructose are far more hygroscopic than sucrose.

  If you bake cookies that are made 100% with white sugar or brown sugar, you can clearly see the difference in spread. This happens because the baking soda in my cookie recipe is a powdered base, and needs some form of acid to react with in order to create the bubbles that leaven the cookie. Slightly acidic brown sugar causes cookies to rise higher when baking, which limits their spread. You end up with a cakier end result. White sugar, on the other hand, adds no leavening power, so you end up with a cookie that spreads wide. Because white sugar-based cookies more readily give up moisture, they also end up more crisp.

  COOKIE FACT #9: WHITE SUGAR = THIN AND CRISP, BROWN SUGAR = TALL AND MOIST

  A mixture of the two provides a good balance, and as I noticed in my egg tests, dissolving too much sugar can lead to a texture that’s too uniform. With sugar left in distinct grains, the pockets of melted sugar that caramelize within the cookie as it bakes remain irregular, giving the cookie more textural interest.

  But brown sugar has another advantage over white: it caramelizes more readily, leading to more intense flavor. I wondered: could I bump up the intensity of the toffee flavor while still maintaining a good white and brown sugar balance by pre-caramelizing some of my white sugar?

  I tried it, heating my white sugar up in a pot until it was a golden amber before adding cold butter to rapidly chill it and then incorporating it into my dough.

  No dice. First off, it’s a mess trying to scrape hot caramel out of a pan and prevent it from hardening into a single massive clump. Secondly, it made my cookies far too soft and chewy (I recalled that in the process of caramelizing sucrose, it breaks down into glucose and fructose, acquiring their hygroscopic properties).

  A much simpler way was to blend only the white sugar with the eggs so that it was pre-liquefied, giving it a little jump start on caramelization, then adding in the brown sugar later on with the melted butter.

  Incidentally, if you want the absolute chewiest, most uniformly textured cookies, try replacing some of the white sugar with corn syrup, a sugar that is even more hygroscopic.

  You end up with wide, flat cookies that stay soft and flexible even when completely cooled. Not only that, but since corn syrup is made up of simpler sugars than granulated sugars, it caramelizes more readily, leading to darker overall color.

  COOKIE FACT #10: CORN SYRUP = SOFT, WIDE, DARK, AND FLEXIBLE COOKIES

  Corn syrup is so darn powerful, in fact, that even a small amount of it will completely alter the texture of your cookie.

  Next up: baking soda and baking powder.

  Leavening

  Leavening—the introduction of air to the internal structure of baked goods—can come in many forms. In bread, it’s the carbon dioxide produced by yeast. In a cream puff, it comes from expanding water vapor. In the case of cookies, we get it from egg proteins capturing expanding gases, creamed butter, and most importantly, chemicals, namely baking powder and baking soda. What’s the difference between the two?

  Baking Soda is pure sodium bicarbonate—an alkaline powder (aka, a base). When dissolved in liquid and combined with an acid, it rapidly reacts, breaking down into sodium, water, and carbon dioxide.

  Baking Powder, on the other hand, is baking soda with powdered acids built right in. In its dry state, it’s totally inert. But once you add a liquid, the powdered acid and base dissolve and react with each other, creating bubbles of carbon dioxide without the need for an external acid source. Most baking powders these days are double acting, which means that it contains two different powdered acids. One that reacts immediately upon mixing with water, and another that only reacts after it’s heated, giving cakes and cookies a little boost early on in the baking phase.

  Making cookies with varying degrees of both soda and powder, I found that baking powder generally produces cakier cookies that rise higher during baking, producing smoother, shinier tops, while soda yields cookies that are craggier and denser in texture

  COOKIE FACT #11: SODA = CRAGGY AND COARSE, POWDER = CAKEY AND SMOOTH

  Cakey cookies are not for me, and the brown sugar I was using in my cookies provided plenty of acid for the baking soda to react with. I landed on ¾ teaspoon as the right amount. Moreover, because the Maillard reaction takes place more readily in mildly alkaline environments, baking soda has a powerful effect on how rapidly foods darken and develop browned flavors. Browning is a good thing when it comes to cookies.

  Flour

  The main differences in flour varieties comes down to protein content. Cake flour contains a relatively low amount, which leads to less gluten formation. Cookies made with all cake flour will be very soft, almost mushy, even when you’ve cooked them to what would normally be a beyond-crisp stage. All-bread-flour cookies, on the other hand, come out ultra-chewy. Alton Brown has a recipe called The Chewy which utilizes this effect.

  COOKIE FACT #12: MORE BREAD FLOUR = CHEWIER COOKIES, MORE CAKE FLOUR = SOFTER COOKIES

  The infamous Jacques Torres recipe from the New York Times calls for a mixture of low-protein cake flour and high-protein bread flour in an attempt to balance the two. I found that by working carefully with the ratio of other ingredients, you can get away with using regular old all-purpose flour with no problem.

  Since flour provides the bulk of the structure in a cookie, the amount you use can alter the texture of the cookie. A small amount of flour compared to butter (a ratio of 1 to 1 or less) will give you cookies that spread out into a wafer-like lace cookie. Extra flour (a ratio of 1.3 to 1 or higher) will give you cookies that barely spread at all as they bake, with centers that stay dense and dough-like, even after being almost fully cooked.

  This may be a good thing for some folks, but I like my cookies to have a nice balance between the two. I settled on a ratio of 10 ounces flour to 8 ounces of butter.

  COOKIE FACT #13: LESS FLOUR = LACIER COOKIES, MORE FLOUR = DOUGHIER COOKIES

  Turns out that how you incorporate that butter also makes a difference (are you sensing a theme here? When it comes to cookies, apparently EVERYTHING MATTERS).

  I tried really working the flour into the butter and egg mixture before subsequently folding in the chocolate chips. It comes out very smooth and it bakes into correspondingly smooth cookies. Because extra kneading creates a stronger gluten network, the cookies also end up rather tough.

  Much better is to barely work the flour in, folding it or mixing it with a stand mixer until it just pulls together into a dough. I incorporate the chocolate half way through this process, so that I don’t accidentally overmix the dough while trying to fold the chocolate in.

  COOKIE FACT #14: LESS KNEADING = CRAGGIER COOKIES AND BETTER TEXTURE

  The resultant scoops of dough should have a natural cragginess to them even before baking.

  The Chocolate

  When I first started testing, I figured that the only real question when it came to chocolate would be what brand and what cacao percentage. Turns out that how the chocolate is incorporated can also affect texture.

  Chocolate chips produce the most regular cookies, with small, melty pockets of chocolate. Chocolate discs and chunks will cause some degree of layering in the dough, creating a flakier cookie with larger sections of molten chocolate. Chopped chocolate produces the most contrast—the small bits of debris and chocolate shavings get dispersed throughout the cookie dough, disrupting its texture and giving a nice chocolatey flavor to the whole affair, while larger chunks still melt into large gooey pockets. The only way to get this effect is to hand-chop whole chocolate bars with a knife.

  COOKIE FACT #15: HAND-CHOPPED CHOCOLATE = MOST INTENSE FLAVOR AND INTERESTING TEXTURE

  Hand chopping also gives you control over the exact size of your chocolate chunks. I quickly discovered that I like quite a bit of chocolate (
a full 8 ounces), and I like it in large, ½- to ¼-inch chunks.

  Fixing Flavor

  Ok, we’ve been at this for a while. Time for a quick recap. So far we’ve covered butter, sugar, eggs, leavening, flour, and chocolate. As far as covering the major chemical and physical players in the cookies’ final outcome, we’re done.

  Here’s what we’re working with so far: White sugar is beaten into whole eggs until it dissolves. Butter is browned and chilled with an ice cube to add back lost moisture and hasten its cooling, before being beaten into the egg mixture, along with brown sugar and. Flour and baking soda are folded in very gently, along with chocolate.

  Salt (and quite a bit of it) is essential to balance the flavor of caramelized sugars, and a good amount of vanilla is a must (though, as our recent taste test has shown, even imitation vanilla flavoring will do just fine).

  COOKIE FACT #16: COOKIES NEED MORE SALT THAN YOU THINK

  COOKIE FACT #17: INEXPENSIVE VANILLA IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM FANCY

  Even with regular salt mixed into the dough, I like adding a little sprinkle of coarse sea salt to the tops of the cookies, gently pressing it in right as they come out of the oven for little crunchy bursts of salt that pop with each bite.

  With flavor and ratios out of the way, it’s time to talk thermodynamics.

  Taking Temperature

  We’ve already seen how the temperature of the dough can affect how chocolate is incorporated, but it can also affect how it bakes. Both the starting temperature of the dough and the oven temperature have an impact.

  I baked cookies at various temperatures in 25°F increments ranging from 250°F up to 450°F. When baked at a lower temperature, the dough has more of a chance to spread out, leading to flatter, wider cookies. Conversely, cookies baked at higher temperatures spread less. Even a difference of as little as 50°F makes a big difference.

  Moreover, the lower the oven temperature, the more evenly the cookie bakes, with less of a contrast between the edges and the center. In fact, when the oven temperature gets low enough (around 275°F and below), you completely lose any contrast, producing a cookie that’s more or less homogenous across the board.

  COOKIE FACT #18: COOLER OVEN = WIDE COOKIES. HOTTER OVEN = COMPACT COOKIES

  Beyond oven temperature, starting temperature of dough also affects the outcome.

  Cookies cooked straight from the fridge will stay a little more compact, while those that are allowed to warm will spread more. By adjusting the starting temperature of the cookie dough and the temperature of the oven, you can create a wide variety of textures and contrasts.

  COOKIE FACT #19: WARMER DOUGH = WIDE COOKIES, COOLER DOUGH = COMPACT COOKIES

  I like the flexibility that being able to cook cookie dough straight from the fridge lends you, so my recipe is designed to make cookies from dough that starts at 40°F. I found that baking in a 325°F oven until the edges are nice and toasty brown will leave you with a cookie that’s still plenty soft and chewy in the center.

  Giving It a Rest

  You still here? I haven’t bored you with cookie talk yet? Good, because we’re coming round third base and into the home stretch here. But not so fast. We gotta take our time with this one. Literally.

  Back when the New York Times published that Jacques Torres recipe in 2008, I’d never heard of the concept of resting a cookie dough, yet Mr. Chocolate himself insisted that it was the secret to better flavor. Since then, I’ve talked to several pastry chefs and cookie experts who all agree: letting your cookie dough sit overnight in the refrigerator produces better tasting cookies.

  It seems a bit finicky (and honestly, who wants to wait for cookies?), but after trying it dozens of times, the results are absolutely undeniable.

  If there’s one single thing you can do to improve the flavor of your cookies, it’s to let the dough rest. They bake up darker and more flavorful. That butterscotch note that was barely hinted at when you baked the dough right after mixing? It’ll blow you away with its intensity and complexity by the second day.

  So how does it work? Harold McGee explains it in Keys to Good Cooking. Turns out that during the resting process, both flour proteins and starches break down a bit. How does this help improve flavor?

  It helps to think of proteins and starches as large LEGO structures. During the process of browning, those large structure are broken down into smaller parts and individual pieces and subsequently rearranged. Sort of like destroying that LEGO castle so you can build a dozen spaceships. Now, both of these phases—the breaking down and the reconstruction—take time.

  By resting the dough, you give the deconstruction phase a head start. It’s as if you left your LEGO castle sitting out over night and your annoying little sister came by and smashed it all, King of Tokyo-style. With the pieces separated, building your spaceships is much faster.

  It’s really the same thing, except instead of LEGOs, you’ve got proteins and flour. Instead of an annoying sister, you’ve got enzymes. And instead of awesome spaceships, you get awesome cookies. How awesome? We’re talking, oh, a million puppies on the moon wearing superhero underpants under their little doggie spacesuits levels of awesome.

  COOKIE FACT #20: AN OVERNIGHT REST YIELDS SUPERIOR FLAVOR

  And while it’s tough to be patient, awesomeness is something worth waiting for in my book.

  When all is said and done, my final recipe has ended up combining some unique techniques from a couple of my favorite recipes—the browned butter from Charles Kelsey’s Cook’s Illustrated recipe and the resting from Jacques Torres’ New York Times recipe—along with a couple of my own novel twists—dissolving half the sugar in the eggs and chilling the melted butter with ice before incorporating—to produce a cookie that hits all the right notes. A deep, rich, butterscotch-and-toffee flavor, crisp edges, and a soft, chewy center, an irregular crumb structure with a craggy top, and a mix of chocolate dispersed through the cookie in fine threads and big gooey pockets, all with a nice sweet-and-salty balance.

  Are they the simplest cookies in the world? No way. Are they worth the extra time and effort? I certainly think so.

  “This is the last batch, I promise,” is what I told my wife about a week ago. Since then I’ve gone through another 10 pounds of flour. Heck, if you want to know the truth, I’ve baked four batches of cookies while I was writing this article, which means that even as I hit that “publish” button, this recipe is already obsolete, a work in progress. My wife went to bed over 5 hours ago and left by giving me a gentle hug from behind and a soft whisper in my ear: “Please stop making cookies.”

  The beauty of understanding how ingredients interact with each other is that even if my definition of the “best” chocolate cookie isn’t in line with yours, if you’ve come along this far, then you know what you need to do to adjust my recipe to suit your own tastes. Like your cookies chewier? Substitute some of that all-purpose flour for bread flour. Want your cookies to rise up a little taller? Add a touch of baking powder or replace the yolk of one of those eggs with an extra white. You like your chocolate in distinct pockets? Just use chocolate chips instead of hand-chopped. Want your cookies more flexible and chewy? Just replace some sugar with a touch of corn syrup.

  You get the idea. Doesn’t that make you feel all empowered and stuff?

  “STOP MAKING COOKIES!”

  I promise I will, dear . . . After this batch.

  The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie

  Ingredients

  8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter

  1 standard ice cube (about 2 tablespoons frozen water)

  10 ounces (about 2 cups) all-purpose flour

  3/4 teaspoon baking soda

  2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt or 1 teaspoon table salt

  5 ounces (about 3/4 cup) granulated sugar

  2 large eggs

  2 teaspoons vanilla extract

  5 ounces (about 1/2 tightly packed cup plus 2 tablespoons) dark brown sugar

  8 ounces semi-sweet c
hocolate, roughly chopped with a knife into 1/2-to 1/4-inch chunks

  Coarse sea salt for granish

  Directions

  Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Cook, gently swirling pan constantly, until particles begin to turn golden brown and butter smells nutty, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and continue swirling the pan until the butter is a rich brown, about 15 seconds longer. Transfer to a medium bowl, whisk in ice cube, transfer to refrigerator, and allow to cool completely, about 20 minutes, whisking occasionally. (Alternatively, whisk over an ice bath to hasten process).

  Meanwhile, whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Place granulated sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Whisk on medium high speed until mixture is pale brownish-yellow and falls off the whisk in thick ribbons when lifted, about 5 minutes.

  Fit paddle attachment onto mixer. When brown butter mixture has cooled (it should be just starting to turn opaque again and firm around the edges), add brown sugar and cooled brown butter to egg mixture in stand mixer. Mix on medium speed to combine, about 15 seconds. Add flour mixture and mix on low speed until just barely combined but some dry flour still remains, about 15 seconds. Add chocolate and mix on low until dough comes together, about 15 seconds longer. Transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate dough at least overnight and up to three days.

  When ready to bake, adjust oven racks to upper and lower middle positions and preheat oven to 325°F. Using a 1-ounce ice cream scoop or a spoon, place scoops of cookie dough onto a non-stick or parchment-lined baking sheet. Each ball should measure approximately 3 tablespoons in volume and you should be able to fit 6 to 8 balls on each sheet. Transfer to oven and bake until golden brown around edges but still soft, 13 to 16 minutes, rotating pans back to front and top and bottom half way through baking.