I bought a ready-made sugar cookie mix; it’s one of those that you just need to add a stick of butter and one egg.
It did not go well. No matter how much I stirred the mixture, it did not set up properly; it formed sort of a “proto-batter” but never got beyond that point. I plan to try it again–I’m sure that I need to add more butter, or possibly a second egg, but I’m not sure which.
I live in Colorado Springs (elevation 6,082 feet). The laughably-misnamed “high-altitude” directions – for some inexplicable reason, manufacturers of mass-produced baking goods universally seem to think that “high altitude” begins at 3,500 feet – say to add a tablespoon of flour, which I did.
The cookie mix never got moist enough to form real batter. I’m hoping that somebody will be able to tell me what I need to add when I try it next time.
Sugar cookies like that aren’t supposed to form a flowing batter. They are supposed to be a pretty stiff dough. It should be like the consistency of modeling clay. If it doesn’t pull together add just a tsp of water to get it sticky.
The butter in the recipe needs to be solid so that it melts while baking. The eggs cook and add lift and structure and a little bit of extra fat. Don’t add a second one. The extra white dries out the cookie.
Did this help or did I totally misread what your problem is?
I love how they can sell " a ready-made sugar cookie mix" that ‘just’ requires the addition of a stick of butter and an egg.
So what is in this ‘mix’? As far as I can recall, the ingredients of what we over here call a biscuit and you call a cookie, are flour, sugar, eggs and butter, with maybe a pinch of salt and a dash of vanilla extract.
Most cake mixes are the same and it is far cheaper to start from scratch.
That’s nothing, bob++. I once saw an “instant guacamole mix” in the grocery store, that was “just add avocados”. I thought that was the lowest you could go… for a whole week. The next time I was at the grocery store, I saw an “instant smoothie mix”, that was “just add strawberries, milk, and crushed ice”.
Butter has two functions, depending on whether it goes in melted or chilled and creamed. Melted, and it provides fat and flavor, and the proteins in the butter provide browning. Chilled and creamed, and it provides fat and flavor and browning, but it also gives lift and shape. The gluten in the flour around the bits of butter gets firm first, then the butter melts, leaving a nice hole behind. This gives a higher, rounder, softer cookie than starting with melted butter. (You can also swap shortening for the butter for an even softer cookie; the higher melting point means even more of the cookie firms before the shortening melts.) Creaming the butter adds air to your cookie, as well. If you want a thinner, denser, crispier cookie, melt your butter first.
Eggs provide lift, as well. They have water, which turns into steam, and that steam physically lifts the cookie structure, and the protein in the eggs solidifies, holding that lift in place.
If your dough isn’t coming together enough to form a ball when you roll it between your hands, it needs a little water, not more egg or butter. But just a little. Go a teaspoon at a time, because water and flour do weird things together. It’ll go from dry and crumbly to too wet and goopy with just a teaspoon too much.
In the 1950s when convenience foods were first being invented, cake mix was one of the first. They went whole hog with powdered egg, dry shortening etc. Just add water, whisk to smooth and pour into the cake pan.
It didn’t sell well. The homemakers of the day felt they weren’t doing enough and it wasn’t “homemade” enough; IOW, it was too store-bought.
So the manufacturers removed the (expensive) powdered egg, had the homemaker add a fresh egg of her (always her in the '50s) own, and viola! 1950s domestic bliss; “homemade” baked goods without the hassle for her. And with improved profit per package for them. Win-win!
Fast forward to 2016 and they still do it that way.
Nowadays folks who don’t cook much won’t have all the fiddly spices and flavors and such. Stuff that every reasonable home kitchen had as a matter of course 20 or more years ago. For them, a “mix” which is the flavoring and the instructions and little more has value. It’s not well-priced ingredient value, but it is practical labor-and-thinking saving value.
As to Chronos’ report of smoothie mix I think it goes like this:
It’s also the case that most manufactured food in 2016 has a massive ingredient list of minor constituents that contribute to the overall flavor, mouth feel, etc. For modern consumers, that’s what “food” tastes/feels like. Just mashing plain fresh berries and plain granulated white sugar together doesn’t taste like “food”; that’s missing so much of the additional stuff that it tastes wrong to many people.
So there’s a real market demand for made-at-home food that tastes manufactured. Which the food-aware folks and the soccer Moms also want to make from fresh ingredients. The easy way to satisfy that demand is with a small packet of flavors and chemistry to which you add your own fresh berries, fresh milk, and crushed ice. Viola. For the manufacturers it’s even better: they can charge all the price of manufactured food while using none of the hard-to-handle or expensive ingredients. Woot!
Eh, not necessarily. A cake mix over in the U.S. often sells for $1.00 each (Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, etc.). Sometimes even less on sale. Whereas a bag of flour (that might make 3 cakes) usually runs about $5. Then there’s all the fiddly spices, leaveners, etc.
Now, if you’ve seen me around Cafe Society, you’d know that I love to cook. But I absolutely suck at baking–other than pies, because pie crust is easy and intuitive for me, and baklava because it’s really hard to screw up. And I don’t know if a random recipe for, say, pound cake (my bete noire) is going to turn out. I’d rather just use a cake mix and tart it up with a delicious homemade icing or filling, because I’m aces at those. Or even adding some more vanilla extract or cocoa powder or what have you. And a $1 cake mix always comes out perfectly, and nobody complains. It tastes like what we consider most cake is “supposed” to taste like, and I’m okay with that.
There was a time that I bought pancake mix that only required water, not eggs, because I didn’t normally keep eggs around for anything else. It wasn’t nearly as good as the mixes that required egg as well. It’s one thing to have powdered eggs, but when it’s reconstituted it somehow isn’t quite the same. What eggsactly that is though, I don’t know.
I had heard that story about homemakers not feeling satisfied just adding water, but after those pancakes I didn’t really believe it. You really need fresh eggs to make things correctly.
American supermarket has everything. First time I go to American supermarket, I see powdered orange juice: “Just add water and you have orange juice.” I keep walking and I see powdered milk: “Just add water and you have milk.”
I continue walking through the store and I see… BABY POWDER!
Thanks for telling me. I’d much rather learn than keep spouting what turns out to be (mostly) BS.
The Snopes position seems to be that there’s a bit of support for the idea; it’s not pure UL. But it isn’t the main explanation of what was going on and so shouldn’t be repeated as fact.
Ref this http://lab.rockefeller.edu/cohenje/PDFs/266CohenSmallPNASHypsoDemo.pdf
about 90% of humanity lives below 3500 ft. and about 98% live below 6000 ft.
I’d bet 3500 feet is about the threshold altitude where the manufacturers think the sloppiest most clueless cooks (i.e. the ones most likely to become customer service issues) start having problems when following the standard directions.
This is what I was wondering about. Cookies are made from a dough, not a batter. (Although, who knows, maybe there is some sort of “cookie” recipe out there made from a batter.) Your description of it the consistency of modeling clay is about right, although the wetness of the dough can vary. Some cookie doughs are stiff enough to roll out, like for Christmas cookies, others are not (“drop” cookies tend to be from the wetter side of things, but still hold their own shape.) At any rate, none of them are a batter. Sugar cookies often come in the rolled variety, so they can have a particularly stiff dough. I’ve never needed to add water to mine, but if the dough didn’t come together at all and hold shape, then I guess I’d try that as the above posters stated. Also, I find that I usually have to “knead” the dough a little bit to have it come together at the end. It’s not really proper bread-style kneading, but compressing the dough a bit so everything comes together.
Kneading it makes the dough tough. And with cookies you don’t want everything to come together. Yes, you cream the wet stuff (took a while to wrap my head around sugar being wet), but you merely mix the wet with the dry. You don’t want long gluten strands, which is what kneading produces.
we use a sugar cookie recipie from a BH&G cookbook that was made back in the 60s and it requires you to mix the dry and wet separately believe me its a mess if ya don’t …
For sugar cookies it needs to be a little stiffer than play dough then ya roll it out and use a cookie cutter ect
Although I have a homemade play dough recipie that’s like a half step from making sugar cookies … but uses something inedible to keep it moist
