Have you ever sat and thought, “What makes the perfect cookie?” Is it the texture? Size? Temperature? There are so many factors to be considered. Well, let me tell you, the perfect cookie is when, “The outside is crispy, the inside is soft and chewy and the transition between hard and soft has to be seamless,” at least that’s what it is for Junior Maliha Shaik. Or maybe your perfect cookie is similar to 9th grade English teacher Ms. Dyer who says, “I like a crispy cookie, through and through.” There are all kinds of different cookies, ranging from crispy, thin, dense, chewy, cakey and many more. Regardless of what you define to be the best, I’m gonna tell you how your perfect cookie becomes perfect.
Flour
Flour is one of the key ingredients to making your cookie since it carries most of the structure. Typically, cookies use one of 3 flours, cake flour, bread flour, and all purpose (AP) flour. Each flour has different percentages of protein. The starches in flour, when baking, absorb the water and a web of protein is stretched and traps any air in the dough. For a more mushy and cake-like cookie, bakers use cake flour, which has less protein (6-8%). And for more chewy cookies, they like to use bread flour which has more protein (12-14%). Normally, most recipes use AP flour because it has 10-12% protein so it’s an inbetween to chewy and cakey.
Leavener
The most common type of leavener for cookies is baking soda and baking powder. Leaveners are essentially what will give your cookies an extra boost to rise. Baking soda will release carbon dioxide when coming into contact with the water and acids (from the flour/sugars) and will give the cookies rise and spread out. Baking powder already has
powdered acids inside it and won’t dissolve until it becomes heated. This gives the cookie a puff of air when the dough would have started to spread out. Baking powder will result in cakier cookies while baking soda results in more spread out cookies.
Butter
Butter can be browned, creamed, or melted. Most of the time, recipes will use melted butter and mix them with sugar to form a paste. This leads to less air and denser cookies. Browned butter is when you melt the butter on a stovetop until there is light foaming and brown specks at the bottom of the pan. Browning the butter gives the cookie a richer flavour than when you would use regular melted butter. Creamed butter is when you whip the butter and sugars together until it turns to a pale yellow color. Doing this adds air to your dough and will help leaven them as they bake, leading to a softer, cakier cookie.
Whether you like them soft or hard, thin or dense, every cookie has a lot of science behind it. Now that you know the whys and hows of cookie making, you too can adjust a recipe to fit your idea of what a perfect cookie could and should be.
