Thursday, March 6, 2014

Follow Up On Cookies!

I've been thinking a lot about chocolate chip cookies lately, and I even came up with my own recipe. When I first made the Tartine chocolate chip walnut oatmeal cookies, I froze some of the dough. I recently was craving a cookie and wasn't ambitious enough to start from scratch, so I decided to just pop a few out of the freezer for a quick fix. I should also mention that that day I was baking bread, and  I didn't have the patience to wait for the oven to cool down from 500F to something more around 350F. So I hastily popped the cookies into a 500F oven. When I checked in on them after about 5 minutes, what do you know??? They were perfect! They were nicely dark around the edges, and they were left nice and chewy on the inside!

At first I thought that perhaps there has been a mistake in my process all along. Perhaps my oven was lying to me, and perhaps its temperature was much lower than I thought. A while ago I got an oven thermometer, and after consulting with it, the temperature seemed to be very accurate. So without any other possible theories, I settled on the claim that all cookie recipe authors are part of a huge conspiracy to hide the best cookie texture from the people. Turns out, for less flour-dense recipes, adjusting the temperature to around 450F is the optimal combination to make a thicker, chewier, more browned cookie (for frozen cookie dough). Hence I will update my Tartine recipe to call for a higher oven temperature for frozen dough, since it improves the cookies so dramatically!


left: 8 minute bake time
right: 5 minute bake time


Enjoy the cookies! You deserve them.