I made this recipe earlier this week. I read a lot of the comments and ended up halving the soda and doubling the cinnamon, cloves, and ginger (I also ground my cinnamon and cloves and I don’t think I’ll ever use pre-ground again!). Other than those changes, I followed the recipe (I used Country Crock, which I’m pretty sure is margarine).
They came out wicked tasty. However, while they were chewy like I expected, they were also quite droopy - way too soft. I’d actually prefer them to be crisp, like a ginger snap.
So, how can I alter this recipe to get the exact same flavor as the first batch but with a much crispier texture?
What did you bake them on, and did you preheat it along with the oven? When I want crispy cookies, I bake them on a preheated pizza stone. I’m not sure how much difference it will make if you’re using regular baking sheets, though–they don’t have that much thermal mass.
I used a regular baking sheet with silpat on top because my very old oven is unreliable and keeps burning the bottoms of things. The baking sheet/silpat combo keeps that from happening.
I don’t have a cooking stone of any kind unfortunately. I’m definitely not in a position to buy one either.
Baking is Chemistry, altering recipes willy-nilly is, well, a recipe for disaster.
That said, use white sugar instead of brown (less hygroscopic) use 2 egg whites instead of a whole egg (Whites dry out baked goods, yolks moisten them. Add cornstarch; gluten makes chew- if you want chewier cookies use bread flour, lower gluten levels = crisper cookies. Conrstarch has no gluten. Ironically, the wetter teh dough, the crisper the cookie
These ideas are all explained, at length in Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise and he other book, Bakewise (the science of cooking). Alton Brown fans will recall he did a show where he took a basic chocolate-chip cookie recipe and made it three diffent ways (normal, extra chewey, and crisp) He took his ideas (he fully acknowledges Corriher’s work as the base for many of his shows; indeed she was a frequent guest) directly from Corriher. I like to play with my baking recipes, but you have to be careful, there are ratios of fat-flour-sugar that really cannot be exceeded. Get the books, she explains them well. Then, when you think you’ve figured it out, make a batch and see what happens. Make alterations as necessary, and bake another. Sometimes it take 3-4 batches to get the recipe where I want it. And hey, failed cookie experiments still taste good!
This would probably be a good time to mention that I failed chemistry, twice.
Unfortunately buying any books is going to have to wait a while (a long while). It’s time to buy textbooks again and this semester will cost me almost $1000 (if I can get them all used). Ugh. My local library definitely doesn’t have the books you recommended. I’ll see if I can get them through CW/MARS.
EmilyG I started out baking them for 9 minutes. I ended up with 15 minutes and half size cookies. The droopiness was there through every batch.
My fiance says this is all a ploy to not have to share my cookies. He is in the process of having his teeth removed and replaced with dentures and he’s at that point where he can’t eat hard food.
Go to a hardware store like Lowes or Home Depot and buy cheap terra cotta tiles, 4 or 6 of the 6 inch ones - you can set them into the oven directly on the wire rack and then bring the oven up to heat. For a fairly small amount, you can have a baking stone.
[I cheated and used an unused shelf from my kiln, but I am lazy that way.]
When I make molasses cookies, I cut them out with a cookie cutter. If you roll the dough thinner, they come out crispier. Congo, I don’t know if you canuse cookie cutters with this recipe - I think I use a slightly differnt recipe.
Was the margarine the stick type, or the tub type? The spreadable types have a much higher water content than the stick types, and don’t work well for baking.
Also, some brands of stick margarine work much better than others for baking. The best way to tell if a stick margarine is suitable for baking is to look at the calories per serving. 80 Calories per Tbsp or above is better for baking.
This is very likely a huge part of the problem then. The only margarine I have is Country Crock in a tub - definitely spreadable. Other than that I have salted and unsalted stick butter which I would have used but the recipe specifically said to use margarine.
You would have to use stick margarine, which is getting really hard to find…it’s not like in the old days. You really have to read the labels. I have switched all my recipes over to butter with no ill effect, and most of them are better for it. The tub stuff just can’t be substituted for real margarine or real butter.
