Science of a Perfect Cookies
Good Bakers how to follow recipes. Great bakers know how to tweak them. How to deviate subtly from the printed word and create something that's not tasty but tailor made to your palate. The line between good and great cookies are easy to navigate. All you need is a little cookie science.
Basic Ingredients
Butter -source of fats and water, if you use cold butter it will be more cakey and less chewy and that is because less gluten are form when the water is trapped in the fats, but if it is melted the cookies are more chewy and and crispy.
Brown Sugar - brown sugar add more toffee flavor and chewy texture and clings more into water so it will be moist. A mixture also of brown sugar and granulated sugar because brown sugar adds to rise while granulated sugar makes the cookie spread before they get cakey .
Eggs -eggs add structure and moisture to cookies. The liquid in eggs helps dissolves the sugar , adding to the toffee flavor and even browning.
Vanilla -vanilla adds warmth and complexity to the flavor. Vanilla essence enhances the taste of many foods, including chocolate and our perception of sweetness. But pure extract can be pretty pricy
Baking Soda -traditional chemical leavener to the cookies, but sometimes baking powder is added for more lift. It reacts to the acid to produce leavening
Check their differences:Baking Soda, Baking powder and their diferences
Flour -flour contributes protein and structure to the cookies. It also adds a wheaty toasty flavor. In other words if your cookie has no flour there will be no structure
Check the protein percentage: Flour classification and protein percentage
Salt -salt enhance sweetness and reduce bitternes.
Chocolate Chips -semisweet or bittersweet chocolate ranges between 40 and 70 percent cacao. The lower the cacao, the sweeter and less bitter the chocolate
Procedure
What does the extra sugar do?
although may seem like a fairly ingredient. It plays a very important and complex role in cookies. It Contributes texture and flavor in many ways. It melts in the heat of the oven ti increase spread and creates little air pockets in the dough to expand and make cookie rise. Sugar also caramelizes and participates in Maillard reaction to add both color and additional notes to flavor, and it recrystallizes upon cooling to give the cookies crispy texture.
When adding a extra tablespoon of granulated sugar, you increase the ration of sugar to fat and flour in the cookie. this will result in a bit more spread, a larger surface are and more material to caramelize and react.
You may notice that the cookies wont be crispy immediately out of the oven, that happens later. While the exact science of cookie cooling is somewhat of a mystery. one theory is that as the molten sugar retreats to its crystalline structure and solidifies , the cookie become crispy as opposed to bendy. Working with that theory, we can understand why the more sugar present to recrystallize, the more snap cookie you will have.
How does granulated sugar reacts to brown sugar?
Granulated sugar contains little to no invert sugar, which is you can find in the molasses or refines syrup added to the sugar. The invert sugar is a single monosaccharide molecules that were created by breaking down the double dissaccharide molecules that make up a granulated sugar or table sugar.
Baking Time
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