Practical alchemy: cookies
To some food comes easily, whipping together raw ingredients akin to alchemy, producing culinary gold. For others this combination of pre-food constitutes a mysterious process, wrought with danger and difficulty. Practical Alchemy hopes to help chronicle my personal journey from a terrified food neophyte scared to handle raw chicken to what may someday be an alchemical wizard, bending food to my very whim.
A scant 3 months ago I insisted upon wearing latex gloves to handle raw meat. 3 months ago I moved out of a condo which had an oven I literally hadn't turned on in the 6 years I had lived there. 3 months ago I was challenged by the idea of making even Kraft blue box Mac'n'Cheese. Luckily a stray neutrino hit my brain after the move and activated my magical Betty Crocker gene.
Having 20-plus-plus years of food eating experience under my belt, but for all practical reasons no food cooking experience to rely on has made a crash course into cooking an interesting experience for me. I've seen others perform this mystical art my entire life and have a great basis of what end results and effects I enjoy, however putting the process together from start to finish is proving to be an interesting journey.
Click through for a first (long) peek into that journey with my most favorite of creations so far: cookies.
Cookies are an excellent example of the practical capabilities of alchemy - a few simple ingredients combining to create something far greater than the sum of their individual parts. At their most simple cookies combine sugar, fat, and flour and then apply heat to solidify their form. The fat holds the flour together, and the sugar adds both sweetness and a chewy quality normally associated with cookies.
Michael Ruhlman's Ratio (a great book which I promise to write more about in a future column) lays out the basic blueprint for a dizzying array of cookies: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat (usually butter), 3 parts flour - all combined by weight. Mix well and then bake at 350 for ~15 minutes and presto: cookies.
Now this little bit of kitchen magic has taken sugar, butter, and flour and turned them into delicious although rather plain cookies. Where the alchemical ingredients to gold really gets interesting is in the fine tuned variations. In the last few months I've made 20 some odd small batches of these cookies, each with little additions, little garnishes trying to get my head around the subtle differences that varied ingredients or techniques produce.
Initially I thought the biggest impact on the end product would be the garnish, be it chocolate chips, oatmeal, or bits of fruit. This misconception was quickly resolved realizing that the details of how the ingredients were combined had more of an effect on the end product than what additional ingredients are added. The most important one of these details turned out to be the handling and preparation of the butter.
Initially I tried melting the butter to make combining it with the sugar and flour a little easier. While this did make the mixing process a breeze it made the dough very runny. While in the oven the cookies spread out more than I wanted resulting in a thin, crispy cookie.
An overcompensation for this was to try forcing a hard stick of butter directly out of the fridge into the mix. While this did produce the thick cookies I wanted as an end result the mixing process was difficult, even when using a giant stand mixer. Taking a more moderate stance I then tried letting the butter stand for an hour or so outside of the fridge prior to using it so as to have a soft (but not melted) room temperature fat to work with.
A deeper fascination with technique came from the suggestion to whip the butter and sugar prior to combining the flour. A few minutes of whipping these two basic ingredients together in a stand mixer makes a surprisingly large impact on the end result. The fluffier butter-sugar mixture traps some air and makes for a fluffier, crumble-on-the-tongue cookie.
Another big impact on the texture and richness of the cookies that I came across was the addition of some egg. Adding a single egg per stick of butter produces a richer cookie with a moister, thicker feel. A few experiments later determine that the best way to add the egg was after the flour had been added to the fluffy butter-sugar mixture. Adding it prior to the flour made for a not-so-fluffy sludge that resulted in a thick cookie almost akin to a sweet bread.
Once this basic dough is ready you can form it into cookies and bake immediately for a plain yet delicious sugar cookie, or you can treat this dough as a foundation for the nearly limitless addition of flavors, garnishes, and other culinary twists. Gently folding in flavor extracts, dried fruits, or other tasty bits can produce a dizzying array of end results.
Before getting to the details of a few great variations I've come to love a quick summation of a few pages of my notes for readers own experimentation: adding dry ingredients such as oatmeal dries out the cookies due to the moisture the ingredients soak up. Conversely overly wet ingredients such as fresh or canned fruits add a lot of moisture and can both increase the baking time required as well as make the dough harder to form into cookie shapes. Taking both of these into account allows the alchemist to balance the dough using both dry and wet garnishes to achieve both the desired taste and consistency.
Basic cookie dough (makes 8-12 cookies):
Combine one stick (4 oz) of room temperature unsalted butter with 2oz of white sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla extract and beat until fluffy.
Gradually mix in 6oz of flour at a medium speed to produce a basic dough.
Mix in a single whole egg.
Mould the dough into 1 inch balls and place on a cookie sheet that has either been lightly greased, or has a Silpat on it. What's a Silpat I hear you ask? A Silpat is the ultimate non-stick baking accessory. It provides even cooking and falls-off-the-sheet non-stick capabilities. Silpat is so awesome I wrote poetry about it. Twice.
Finally flatten each ball into a rough cookie shape and stick them in an oven pre-heated to 350 for ~15 minutes or so. When the bottom edges of the cookies start to turn a slightly darker shade of brown and there is no apparent moisture pool on the top of the cookies they are done.
Coconut almond cookies:
A personal favorite variation on the above basic cookies includes flavors of almonds and coconut for a light cookie that dares you to eat a single one. To the above cookie dough recipe I mix in ½ teaspoon of almond extract, 1oz of crushed almonds, and 1oz of shredded baking coconut.
Tropical rum cookies:
For a fun fruity dessert you can also add fruits to the cookies. I've had the best luck working with dried fruits and rehydrating them myself shortly before baking to avoid extra moisture. This variation is best omitting the egg from the basic cookie dough to compliment the light airy texture tropical fruits bring to mind.
Prior to making the dough I finely chopped 1oz each of dried cranberries and dried pineapple chunks. These and the zest from a lime are soaked in enough dark rum to cover them, and the juice from the now-denuded lime. An hour or so of soaking and the fruits plump up beautifully and are ready to strain and add to the egg-free cookie dough for baking. The now-fruity rum makes for some fantastic drinks should you be so inclined.
And there you have it - from someone who never thought they would bake cookies, let alone write page after page about how awesome baking cookies. Try them out, let me know what you think? Since I'm obviously fresh and new to the wild world of culinary alchemy post a comment to let me and the rest of the weekly geek readership know what comments or suggestions you have that could make a more sublime cookie.
--Sparky
