cookies-to-be
Last weeks' NY Times Style section had an article about the best chocolate chip cookies in the city and an accompanying recipe for the best possible chocolate chip cookies.
Someday I'll try that, when I am in the mood to buy both cake flour and bread flour, as well as really expensive chocolate. For now, I just mixed up a batch of the regular Toll House recipe, but I'm following two of the tips from the article: first, I made sure all the ingredients were room temperature before I mixed them up. Second, I'm letting the dough sit for about 36 hours before I bake it.
In the article, you can read about an experiment the journalist did to test whether waiting 36 hours really mattered. He mixed up a large batch of dough and baked 1/3 of it after 12 hours, the next third after 24 hours, and the final third after 36 hours. Then he had his family do a taste test, and the 36-hour batch won handily. The scientists among you will have noticed, however, that there's an important other factor he didn't control for: number of hours since baking at the time of the test. The correct way to run this experiment would have been to mix one batch 36 hours ahead of time, one 24 hours ahead, and one 12 hours ahead, then bake them all together.
Maybe I'll do that experiment sometime, too.
Someday I'll try that, when I am in the mood to buy both cake flour and bread flour, as well as really expensive chocolate. For now, I just mixed up a batch of the regular Toll House recipe, but I'm following two of the tips from the article: first, I made sure all the ingredients were room temperature before I mixed them up. Second, I'm letting the dough sit for about 36 hours before I bake it.
In the article, you can read about an experiment the journalist did to test whether waiting 36 hours really mattered. He mixed up a large batch of dough and baked 1/3 of it after 12 hours, the next third after 24 hours, and the final third after 36 hours. Then he had his family do a taste test, and the 36-hour batch won handily. The scientists among you will have noticed, however, that there's an important other factor he didn't control for: number of hours since baking at the time of the test. The correct way to run this experiment would have been to mix one batch 36 hours ahead of time, one 24 hours ahead, and one 12 hours ahead, then bake them all together.
Maybe I'll do that experiment sometime, too.