Jacques Torres' recipe created a stir among foodies when it appeared in the New York Times in 2008, mostly because of the instruction to chill the dough for between 24 and 36 hours before use. Jacques Torres recipe chocolate chip cookies baked from dough rested for 24, 36 and 48 hours (l-r). This uses equal amounts of vegetable oil and margarine whizzed together with the other ingredients, and produces a moist, yet crisp result – but I miss the taste of the butter. My school friend Alex's authentically American mother Charlotte makes fabulous chocolate chip cookies to a recipe whose origins are lost in the mists of time. One recipe, however, eschews butter entirely. The gluten makes a cookie chewy." Again, I'm not sold on the chewiness, so I'll be sticking with the creaming method. When melted butter is added to a dough, the proteins in the flour immediately grab onto the freed water molecules to form elastic strands of gluten. When butter is melted, the fat and water molecules separate. Alton Brown's recipe, however, starts with melted butter, which, according to American magazine Cooks Illustrated, is essentially for a chewy result: "In its solid state, butter is an emulsion of butter and water. The fat in most cookie recipes comes from butter – usually creamed with sugar. A short note on fatĬharlotte Matts recipe chocolate chip cookies. This definitely gives a lighter texture, but I'm not sure that's what I'm after from a cookie – I want it doughy or crunchy rather than cakey. Raising the gameīicarbonate of soda is the most common raising agent in chocolate chip cookies, used by Nigel Slater, David Lebovitz, the Toll House, Alton Brown and Claire Clark, while Marcus Wareing goes for baking powder, and both Edd Kimber and Jacques Torres plump for both. I'm not sure about chewy, frankly: as a Brit, I like a bit of crunch to the edges of my cookie, which means allowing a little bit of spread in order to give a slightly thinner result. Intriguingly, however, American culinary celebrity Alton Brown and Marcus Wareing both use strong bread flour instead – with Jacques Torres, aka "Mr Chocolate", using a mixture of strong bread and fine cake flour in the recipe for his chain of American patisseries.īoth bread and cake flour, according to McGee on Food and Cooking "produce doughs and batters that spread less" – giving a puffier, chewier result which, in Wareing's case, even verges on the crumbly. The Toll House, Claire Clark, Great British Bake Off 2010 winner Edd Kimber and pastry god David Lebovitz all use plain flour in their cookies. Marcus Wareing recipe chocolate chip cookies. Think of the difference between the puzzlingly named Rich Tea, and a double doozie or a snickerdoodle: the Puritans clearly left their recipe books behind when they fled these shores. American cookies, meanwhile, tend to be richer and softer than our biscuits. ![]() In much of the world the biscuit follows the Oxford Companion to Food's definition of something "small in size, thin, and short or crisp in texture" while in North America it closely resembles a British scone. We don't go in for cookies much in the UK and it's not just a linguistic difference, but a practical one. It was dear Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, who came up with the brilliant idea of adding chocolate to her butter cookies some time in the 1930s. But while we've created some fine examples in our time (the wholesome fig roll, the posh viscount, even the garish pink wafer), it's America, birthplace of the awful whoopie pie and the downright evil red velvet cake, which takes the gold medal in this arena, for inventing the chocolate chip cookie. I'm proud of the fact that, according to a recent radio programme, we Brits are "one of the word's biggest spenders when it comes to biscuits. I'm a patriot about baked goods, soldiering bravely along in the belief that the British rule the waves at teatime.
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