Chocolate Chip Cookies

(Still shot from a Nestle semi-sweet morsels commercial ca. 1989)

Chocolate chip cookies were my thing growing up. I knew nothing about the Toll House Inn, though in the days before Wikipedia, I did wonder why they were called Toll House cookies. Regardless of what they were called, I knew the Harvest Gold package of morsels was a foundation for aesthetic experimentation, for making people happy.  

I baked cookies over the years for youth leaders who made adolescence more bearable. As thanks for sundry kindnesses like helping me move or giving me a ride somewhere. When I was getting to know the brother I had never known and wanted him to love me. Or needed to pay for a ski trip with our church youth group. For weeks I sold cookies for 25 cents each to kids at my high school until I had the $40 or whatever it cost for the ski package (this was 1989 and at out-of-the-way Hoodoo Ski Bowl). I carried around foil-wrapped cookies in a floral Hallmark gift bag and surreptitiously passed them up classroom aisles while quarters and dollar bills flowed back to me. Or did quick transactions in front of lockers amid the din between periods. It was surprising how quickly the quarters added up. I was tempted to continue selling cookies at school even after the ski trip but figured I had probably pushed my luck and the turned blind eyes of my teachers long enough. At some point someone was going to complain that my homemade, non-commercially kitchened cookies were a potential health hazard. Or worse, accuse me of selling drugs. Though one of my mom's many boyfriends did think I should consider a more long-term cookie business. And for god's sake, sell them for more than a mere quarter. 

I loved this ability I had to give pleasure with sugar, eggs, and chocolate chips. Like magic. Or, no, not magic exactly. Because there was effort involved. And my freshman year of high school, there was also real self control when I was infatuated with a boy who I heard didn't eat sugar (and to whom I'd never so much as spoken to) so I, too, would not eat sugar. I baked all those cookies for my ski trip cookie business without so much as dipping my fingers into the dough even once (take that Marshmallow Test!). And there was the perceptible pleasure in watching the butter and sugars form a dough, then expand as I added eggs and flour. A satisfying orderliness as I dropped the dough onto the cookie sheet in uniform four by three rows. A giddy gratification as I took the hot cookie sheet out of the oven with the dough now transformed into crispy, gooey happiness. 

Sometime in college I learned (reading Taste of Home?) that I needed to use real butter instead of the margarine my mom always bought. I also played around with not using eggs. My mom once babysat a kid who was allergic to eggs. His mother said she usually just substituted 1/4 cup of water for eggs when she baked cookies. I found this made the cookies less cake like, slightly more chewy. But without the protein and fat in eggs, the cookies would dry out quickly--though peanut butter does have enough to make this work and I still do this when I'm baking cookies for a friend who is lacto-vegetarian. 

Most of my experimenting over the years involved adding other ingredients--peanut butter, oats, cocoa, pumpkin puree. But I always felt a vague dissatisfaction with my basic recipe. Even with butter instead of margarine, the cookies spread too much. Following Martha Stewart's advice to make sure the butter was 60 degrees helped a little. As did increasing the flour slightly. Browning the butter gave it a deeper--but different--flavor. Still, I wanted something chewier, more substantial. Every recipe I found that promised me a chewy cookie left me disappointed.

It seemed like in the late-2000s there was an explosion in boutique cookie shops with accompanying cookbooks. But what little energy I had for standing upright in the kitchen was spent learning Chinese medicinal cooking and various other forms of potential food-based cures (with stunning success!). Otherwise, my baking was mostly seasonal: pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, homemade candies at Christmas, the occasional banana bread, blueberry-cornmeal muffins, pumpkin gingerbread--punctuated by soft molasses, peanut butter chocolate chip and the favorite of many (especially my Long-Distance Lover), Oatmeal-Cranberry Chocolate Chip cookies. 

But sometimes I just get a craving for Toll House like I did in early July. I had just bought Ella Quittner's Obsessed By The Best: 100+ Recipes Methodically Tested on an ebook clearance sale and remembered there was her ultimate chocolate chip cookie recipe. I skimmed. Butter browned with dry milk powder. Extended blending of the cooled butter and sugars. A combination of buckwheat with wheat flour. A tangzhong. Chopped Nestle Crunch bars in addition to a variety of chocolates. Resting the dough for 6-72 hours. Freezing balls of dough for at least 25 minutes before baking. Slamming the cookie sheet straight from the oven on a hard surface to deflate the centers. Forming the still hot cookies with the rim of a glass so they are perfectly round (this one is total DSM-diagnosis level obsession given that if your cookie dough is already a ball going into the oven per the recipe, they're pretty damn round coming out). 

But...like...my inner Veruca Salt wanted cookies NOW!

The next recipe in Quittner's book was for bar cookies. And it was much closer to a traditional chocolate chip cookie recipe--save for the addition of malted milk powder. I did not have malted milk powder but I did have regular dry powdered milk. I worked out what seemed to be the right proportion (in this case, about 3/4 cup with the usual Toll House recipe halved) and added it after creaming the (non-browned) butter and sugars. Aside from bumping the flour from 1 1/8 cup to 1 1/3, the recipe remained the Toll House recipe. Though I indulged and used a precious stick of Kerrygold. 

Reader, this powdered milk cookie that came out of the oven was the cookie I've been searching for all these years: chewy and substantial with plenty of hot gooeyness and just the right hint of crunch. The higher-fat Kerrygold gave it a rich buttery-ness. 

Of course, curiosity got the better of me and a week later I tried Quittner's recipe (which, with its many mini-procedures, lent itself well to my need for frequent rest breaks). It definitely had a more complex flavor between the toffee notes of the browned butter and the nutty, almost faintly bitter character of the buckwheat. 

But the structure--the crumb--was flat, mushy even. Because I usually bake cookies in batches of twos or fours (two for me, two for my caregiver or visitor), I got a bit of practice at the hard surface thing after taking them out of the oven. The trick was merely tapping the cookie sheet against a hard surface rather than slamming (though I've found the powdered milk cookies can do with a bit of slamming). Yet I think the main problem was the tangzhong. This is a technique of gelatinizing a bit of flour in warm milk or water (similar to a roux but without the butter). I've seen and used it in bread recipes where it makes the bread very soft and slows it going stale. But in a cookie it seems worse than pointless. 

I preferred the buttery-chew of my powdered milk cookie despite the more complex flavor of the Quittner cookie. But what did other people think? I did a taste test with my caregiver, my massage therapist, and my next door neighbor. 

 

 

("A" is the powdered milk cookie; "B" is Quittner's cookie. The lighting is terrible because, 

like many people with ME/CFS, light is hard for me )

Everybody preferred the look and crumb of my powdered milk cookie. All but my neighbor preferred the taste of the powdered milk cookie--though everyone agreed that the Quittner cookie had a more complex flavor. However, the dough had been sitting in the fridge for a good ten days by the time my neighbor did the taste test, which meant that the powdered milk cookie had lost some of its buttery richness while the flavors of the Quittner cookie had only deepened. Plus by this point I'd sussed onto "tapping" instead of "slamming" the cookie sheet out of the oven so the structure wasn't quite so flat. 

There have been far fewer people to make happy with cookies these last twenty years. My energy for aesthetic experimentation in the kitchen waxes and wanes. But my delight with both has remained constant. As has my enjoyment of a hot, gooey, perfectly chewy chocolate chip cookie.