seryn

I read that cookie dough is vastly improved by aging for 24-48 hours in the refrigerator. So I made some "Toll House" cookie dough, minus the chocolate. I used my ancient cookbook. It's over 50 years old.

And the Nestle people lie. The recipe really has changed.

The current recipe on the bag of chocolate chips says 2 sticks of butter and 2 eggs. My recipe says 2/3C shortening and 1 egg. Eggs in both recipes are marked "large". But in reality a modern large egg is bigger than a large egg from 25 years ago. The version of the recipe I have wants 1 cup of chocolate chips. The current version wants a "whole bag" of chips. With that much chocolate, it oozes out and burns to the tray.

I buy pound blocks of Plugra butter when I'm going to be doing baking. There was a lot of math involved.

I had 194g butter. The butter wrapper says 1lb butter=454g. 2 sticks is 1/2lb or 227g. 2 sticks is 1C. So I needed 2/3 of 227g. I almost had it worked out when I was interrupted and asked if something was wrong. 72g is 1/3C butter. So I put in 3/4ths of the butter I had previously weighed, by eye.

There's a secret to making cookies that no one seems to know. You cannot use a mixer. It's a some effort to cream butter and sugar, but mixers incorporate too much air. Also you can always taste the effort in food. I really believe that.

So anyway. I've got cookie dough chilling in the 'fridge. I'll press some chocolate chips into the batter after I slice the cookies.

Start to finish, including several minutes of math and cleaning up after. 19 minutes.