
The Science of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies (2013) - frutiger
https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-chip-cookies.html
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l_t
I've made hundreds (thousands?) of batches of chocolate chip cookies. They're
my favorite dessert!

I think this is a great article but I wanted to highlight some of what I've
found to be key points for making the best cookies, at least for me
personally.

1\. Butter should be soft, _not melted_. Melted butter makes flat cookies.
(Some people like flat cookies -- you can melt your butter. Heathens.)

2\. Follow order of operations in the recipe. Butter is creamed with the
sugar, then add wet ingredients, then add dry ingredients. Stir after each
stage. Batter should be extremely smooth.

3\. Ideally, batter should be chilled in refrigerator before using. But this
is not required, unless you melted your butter.

4\. Once formed, roll cookie dough balls in sugar before putting them on the
parchment paper. Adds slightly crunchy, brown outer layer.

5\. Sprinkle some coarse salt on top, to taste.

6\. Use multiple types of chocolate chips. Specifically, I like a mixture of
milk chips + semisweet chips. This makes the cookie flavor less boring.

edit: In terms of the base recipe, I use the Joy of Cooking recipe. Tollhouse
chocolate chips also have a recipe on the packaging which is basically much
the same.

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nlawalker
Definitely agree on 1-3. I have found that chilling in the refrigerator also
results in a better shape, plus I also like the way it divides the work (make
the dough and clean up one day, then bake the next). I'll have to try 4, 5 and
6, those are great ideas.

My own tip to throw in the mix: if you naturally gravitate towards making big
cookies (because who doesn't like a really big cookie?), try making small
ones!

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dharmon
If all of this seems too complicated and you want an easy way to take cookies
from fine / good to great, stick with your standard Tollhouse recipe, but let
the dough sit in the fridge for a day or two (the linked article talks about
this). Its a super easy way to give them a deep, toffee-like flavor.

Brown butter cookies are really good, but the nuttiness can be intense. Often
I prefer regular creamed-butter recipes. Also, the #1 way people screw up
browned-butter cookies is not letting the butter cool enough.

Also not a huge fan of the chopped chocolate. I prefer the pockets of
chocolate that chips give rather than chocolate everywhere.

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jnellis
> stick with your standard Tollhouse recipe, but let the dough sit in the
> fridge for a day or two

About 18 hours seems to be optimal (for me!) As well as letting the dough rest
at least an hour to get closer to room temp before spooning to the baking
sheet.

What is never talked about when analyzing a good tollhouse cookie is the
underside pattern. There should be a 1/8"-1/4" noticeable line around the
bottom of the outer edge. This is the fault line of where the base of the
cookie starts to solidify from baking and the subsequent spreading action of
the dough past this point in time, which 'rolls over' this fault line. This
metric can tell you a lot regarding whether your dough has too much butter,
too much sugar, too cold, too warm, too whipped during the creaming stage, too
mixed after adding flour, oven temp, cooking time, baking surface, etc. Once
you start getting anal-ytical about your 'process', this one metric is an easy
visual that can pinpoint what went wrong or how to improve when you start
controlling for variables. The tollhouse recipe is nearly the perfect set of
ingredients but you can get a wide range of results just on process alone yet
most people go straight to tinkering with the ingredient list to improve.
Resist.

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adam
As an aside, whenever I need to make a can't miss recipe, I google that dish
name + seriouseats food lab. Never had a fail from Kenji and his methodology
in constructing recipes.

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mcphage
This is a long shot, but some years back Robert X. Cringley had a column
talking about a company (possibly out of Israel) who did training for a
business optimization technique. At at some point one of the owners decided to
try it on chocolate chip recipes, and it worked out really well. Does that
ring a bell for anyone?

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rozim
From Google, "Bayesian Optimization for a Better Dessert":
[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/f52ac33bc9d1adecd3a8037a7009b185fd934f0e.pdf)

This is a lighter presentation of the same:
[https://9to5google.com/2017/12/04/google-smart-cookie-
recipe...](https://9to5google.com/2017/12/04/google-smart-cookie-recipe-ai/)

~~~
mcphage
This wasn’t what I was thinking of (time period was ~2010), but is very
interesting nonetheless—so thank you!

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AstralStorm
Close enough, I've spotted a minor mistake:

Butterscotch flavor from butter is done via esterification in high
temperature, which does require both saturated fats, protein, right acidity
and high heat. (Same ester is added to e.g. popcorn as flavoring.)

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RandomBacon
This post appears to be inspired by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20281414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20281414)

I said I would only upvote it if that user posted it.

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tzakrajs
Anyone else remember the ML cookies at Google? Are they still doing that?

