
Incrementally Better Cookies - dedalus
https://mikewest.github.io/cookie-incrementalism/draft-west-cookie-incrementalism.html
======
kepano
Based on the title, I was expecting an equally nerdy take on incremental
improvements to the classic cookie recipe, along the lines of this great
article by Kenji Lopez-Alt: [https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-
lab-the-best...](https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-
chocolate-chip-cookies.html)

~~~
justwalt
Me too, and I was looking forward to it.

When I have time, I want to experiment with doing a sort of gradient descent
on an array of different cookie recipes to find the best ratios of
ingredients. That would be an interesting project.

~~~
burfog
You would have to constrain your experiment to some definition of "cookie" to
prevent it from converging on a "cookie" that is pure dark chocolate.

~~~
Qwertystop
You'd have to get there through gradient descent, though. A pile of dark-
chocolate chips is quite good, but a "cookie" that is a pile of chips baked
with a small but nonzero amount of butter, flour, and baking soda... isn't.
Gradient descent would have trouble with getting you through that, because
cutting out the baking only makes it worse, and cutting out the other
ingredients without cutting out the baking _also_ only makes it worse, and
reducing the amounts of everything that isn't chocolate without bringing them
to zero _still_ only makes it worse.

~~~
justwalt
Instead of gradient descent, I should have said the shotgun method. I imagine
giving out a few cookies of varying quantities of ingredients to neighbors and
then choosing the best. Though, this method does lead to potential local
maxima.

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davee5
Well I too was hoping for cookie iteration, mostly because that's been one of
my side hobbies for a while.

I don't have Food Lab style process shots posted anywhere because this took me
a decade of fussing over dozens of iterations, but I do have my current recipe
here:

[http://devansdesign.com/personal#/cookies/](http://devansdesign.com/personal#/cookies/)

~~~
burfog
It starts off with "The egg sets the baseline unit for all other ingredients;
1 egg mass = 1 unit." and

    
    
        1   egg
        2   white sugar
        3   brown sugar
        4   AP flour
        e   unsalted butter  [2.72]
        π   chocolate chips  [3.14]
    

but then it continues on with this usage of absolute volume measurements:

    
    
        1/2 tsp baking soda
        3/4 tsp kosher salt
        1   tsp vanilla extract*
    

Is it really true that cookies made with hummingbird eggs need a much larger
portion of those ingredients than cookies make with ostrich eggs?

~~~
davee5
I'll concede the point on relative vs absolute units (poor geek form) with
practical caveats:

\- the preamble clearly calls out the FDA std ~50g large chicken egg as the
nominal egg unit.

\- the recipe targets home bakers with basic equipment and small batches.

I've converted the small volume measures into mass & egg-ratios in the past,
but the numbers butt up against the tolerances of most home kitchen scales and
results get dicey. I've also discovered that OXO scales use some some of
smoothing function that allows you to load 20 grams of slowly ground salt at
"0" grams if you do it slowly enough. That was a bad batch...

