What She Shovels

I have a slight addiction. A slight cookie addiction. Warm, soft, chewy, delicious. Mmmm! Oatmeal, chocolate chip, chocolate toffee, yum yum.

The perfect chocolate chip cookies have eluded me for years, but I’m slowly chipping away at it, and I’m pretty darn close now. They need to be chewy, flavorful, not cakey, not flat and not greasy.

The Cookie Company has some darn fine cookies (the [chocolate] and [ginger] crinkles are divine), but their chocolate chip don’t do it for me. There’s no crunchy exterior, and all too often, the middles are just too far south of done to be perfect. Nugget’s are the only grocery store cookies I’ll consider eating, but they don’t have that… something… that makes a cookie perfect to me.

I’ve had some problems with batches I’ve cooked up recently, and due to some recent testing I’ve determined the butter I was using was different than what I’d used in the past and its higher water content gave me some problems with flatter than usual cookies. It did cross my mind to do a side-by-side comparison to determine exactly how much water each had, but then somebody took something from someone else and reality came biting back.

It started with Alton Brown and an episode on Good Eats, Three Chips for Martha. Then I realized the cookies of my youth were different than anything I’d made because of differences in butter:shortening, cooking times and chilling.

I’ve tinkered with the bag recipe, used some of his hints, taken some from Cook’s Illustrated, and lots of experience, and I’m getting there.

It’s a darn good thing my physical therapist cleared me this morning to ride my bike again. I see more testing in my future!