What ingredients and/or baking procedures/techniques determine whether a cookie is crunchy or soft? The other night I suddenly got a craving for oatmeal cookies, so I Googled up this recipe and made a batch. They weren’t bad, but they were a bit dryer and crunchier than I would have liked. How do I make the really soft, chewy cookies that are traditionally associated with oatmeal cookie recipes?
The short answer is that I always use the recipe on the Quaker Oats carton.
A longer answer is that Alton Brown did a show on this topic several years ago with chocolate chip cookies. There are three recipes:
Generally speaking …
Using butter as the fat will make the cookies spread more than when using shortening. Butter has some water in it, whereas shortening is essentially 100% fat.
Most recipes call for creaming the fat with sugar; if you melt the fat instead, you’ll get less air and a chewier result. The kind of flour used makes a difference – bread flour has more gluten than all-purpose, which has more gluten than cake flour.
Finally, the amount of egg makes a difference, as does whole eggs vs. whole/yolk/whites.
There are also some good tips here: http://baking911.com/cookies/101_tips.htm
If I did everything as you suggested but substituted margarine for the butter, would it still work? I always have tons of bread flour on hand, as well as everything else listed, but I do not keep butter in the house.
One little trick, once you have made them: to keep them soft, store with some bread in your bag or jar. The bread gets hard; the cookies stay soft.
I do the Cook for Good oatmeal cookies and they are the most universally acclaimed ones I’ve done. Delicate coming off the pan, though.
I have a recipe for what we call “Monster (-sized) Cookies.” It’s like an Otis Spunkmeyer…has rice krispies, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, coconut, walnuts… Monster=put blobs of dough the size of golf balls on the cookie sheet and flatten slightly.
Anywho Zsofia’s last comment reminded me of them. The recipe indicates to pull them, then let them sit on the cookies sheet for two minutes before attempting to pull off. They sort of finish baking on the pan. The result is a crun-chewy cookie, sort of a firm outer shell with soft chewy goodness inside.
Now I’m all hungry! :smack:
Maybe experiment with a shorter baking time and/or lower temp.
Also, replacing more or all of the white sugar with brown helps keep a cookie moister and chewier.
Seriously, though, who even likes flat and or crunchy cookies? Blech.
You can keep butter in the freezer, you know.
I sharply limit my consumption of saturated fats.
I love them fairly flat (not paper thin but not bulging at all), borderline crunchy around the edge, and chewy in the middle. TO DIE FOR!
? how do you keep fresh warm cookies around for more than a day?
No, margarine does not cook like butter, it is a chemically created product, butter is actually made from cream by agitation and the water in it is a remainder from the manufacturing process.
Are you using bread flour in the cookies? Bread flour has more gluten than all-purpose flour and will absorb more water and will give you a dry, tough cookie. I’ve substituted margarine for butter in cookies many times and haven’t had a problem with that.
Could this be the answer to the age old question of why the Toll House recipe used to recommend adding a teaspoon of water? Just to counteract the folks who used margarine/shortening instead of butter?
The other thing I do that seems to help is take them out before they’re 100% done - they will continue cooking a little on the tray. This means you have to watch them and be Johnny quick on pulling them out.
I found a recipe recently that makes delicious soft chewy cookies - the best I have ever had. It contains butter (lots of it) and brown sugar. I’ll see if I can hunt it down.
Margarine and butter are the equivalents in this regard – both have water and other not-fat substances in them. Shortening is 100% fat.
To the OP, while I don’t cook with margarine any more, there is no reason that using REGULAR STICK margarine instead of butter should have produced a significantly different result. If you used soft/tub margarine, or if you used reduced fat/calorie margarine, there would be a big difference.
Margarine is an abomination! Created by passing hydrogen gas through vegetable, or other oil, so it stays solid at room temperature. It is not better for your health than butter and has no place in cooking anything. Might as well just pour oil in the recipe.
Cookies, any pastry, and particularly bread, require BUTTER! Save some calories or fat in another part of your diet. But use butter when cooking anything that needs to react with flour.
And after trying them all, the winner and champeen is……Zsofia’s Cook for Good cookies. Almost exactly what I was after. I broke down and used butter, and they were magnifique. I also substituted butterscotch chips for half the raisins. Mmmm…good cookie.
substituting honey for sugar will make them even softer and chewier than brown sugar.
Chewy vs. Crunchy Cookies???
Let Chewy win.
Crunchy Cookies don’t pull people’s arms out their sockets when they lose.
typo