Lesson 5: Cookie Monster

Cookies. We all know them. Those delicious, delicate, finger-lickin' good morsels. In French they are referred to as "petits fours" which means "little oven goods". (McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 2004).

Cookies are usually very sweet and rich. They are also very moist and soft, due to new techniques in baking that help prevent the formation of gluten (remember my spiel on gluten?). Cookies can be soft, chewy, crunchy, flaky, with slight changes of ingredients and changes in the method that the ingredients are combined.




Let's learn a little more about cookies...

1. Flour

• For best results, use pastry or all-purpose flour
• High proportion of flour-water makes shortbread and pastry dough cookies (this means they are dry)
• High proportion of water-flour makes batter based cookies (can be soft or crunchy)

2. Sugar (yum)

• When sugar is creamed with the fat (like butter or an egg) it creates air bubbles which makes the cookie light and airy. 
• Sugar raises the starch gelation temperature, which makes the cookie crispy
• A good proportion of sugar dissolves when mixed with liquid and then again during the baking process

3. Eggs

• Provide the bulk of water in a cookie mix
• Provides the protein that is necessary to bind the flour particles together
• The more eggs or egg yolk in a cookie recipe, the more "cake like" your cookies will turn out (this is because the fat in eggs make baked goods moist)

4. Fat

• Fat, like butter, margarine, or shortening, provides the moistness and suppleness 
• When the fat melts, it assists the spreading out of the cookie by lubricating flour particles, hence you have a flat disk shaped cookie instead of a ball of dough
• Butter melts at a lower temperature, so it gives more time for the protein and starch to set in

5. Leavening

• Leavening agents are used to tenderize cookies and make them "puff" when carbon dioxide is released
• Some cookies only undergo the leavening process when the sugar is creamed with butter
• Other cookie recipes use alkaline baking soda, especially when the dough has an acidic content due to honey, brown sugar, and cake flour

source

* Source: McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 2004.