On the Baking of Cookies: a Highly Sciencey Study

Introduction: While some have noted that cookies are low in nutrition and high in fat and sugar, others have argued that they are the perfect food, akin to breast milk but in no way limited to being consumed by small babies. In fact, they may be wasted on small babies, who reportedly can be tricked into thinking peas are dessert (although not my baby). Despite whiffs of perfection, a recently published report (see: New York Times of a few days ago, but sometime within the last week) suggested that certain tricks and techniques could improve Your Loyal Researcher's cookie baking methodology. YLR generally rises to such bait, and scurried out to procure the necessary ingredients.

Methods: As previously noted, eight cookies were baked more or less simultaneously with YLR's reading of the article. Four had milk chocolate chunks, four had 60% cacao bittersweet discs, and three of each kind were topped with coarse sea salt. The rest of the dough was also split 50-50 between the kinds of chocolate and left to rest for 36 hours. Most of it got salted also. The "make the cookies bigger" technique suggested in the article was not employed, as we think it is a gimmick for bakeries to charge more for their cookies and we prefer a nice bite-sized cookie, thank you very much.

Results: As noted by commenter MHC, the dough decreased noticeably in volume between being left to rest and baking. The resting dough also lent itself to sassy comments from interested parties who think they're funny about the dough being tired and what kind of baby is it that it needs to rest all the time? The salting technique could use improvement because YLR makes cookies in tight little balls, so the salt just perched on top of the ball and ended up in one little part of the cookie. However, that teeny little part was yummy, and reminiscent of Vosges' Barcelona flavor, with which YLR is slightly obsessed. Along with preheating the oven adequately, the resting time did improve the cookies' evenness and delightful goldenbrownness. The darker chocolate was enjoyed by 33% of tasters. Another 33% did not like it, and a third 33% was so excited to get her grubby little mitts on a cookie that she wouldn't have noticed if it were full of worms. A fourth candidate for cookie consumption was vigorously prevented from reaching the experimental setup due to potential interspecies bias.

Conclusions: It is hard to improve upon your basic Toll House cookie. Try all you like, the regular ones still seem just as good as all the ones you are messing with. I might try mixing the course seat salt in with the dough next time, and I do think the resting made them turn out nicely. In general I think the recipe needs a little more flour and a little less chocolate than is written on the bag.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to my family for their support during this stressful time of experimentation. This research was supported by grant #aaron.has.a.regular.job.that.allows.me.to.indulge.my.cookie.habit