I have never been very good at baking but recently tried my hand at baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch. The recipe was very specific that the butter should be cold when making the cookie dough. I dutifully followed the recipe to a “T” and the cookies came out great and were a huge hit with co-workers and friends.
One asked me to describe the recipe and I mentioned the cold butter. “Oh no,” she said. “Cookie dough should be made with soft butter!” M’kay…didn’t know what to say to that except that the result seemed to speak for itself but not having any real baking experience I had no idea why I did the things I was told to do in the recipe.
So why did I use cold butter? Would soft or even melted butter change anything noticeably? To my mind it is butter in dough. Not sure why it would matter if warm or cold but the people who do this a lot seem to think it is important to note so I am probably missing something.
It is indeed. I was making Christmas cookies once by hand and got tired of waiting for the butter to soften. So I just put the mixing bowl in the microwave and nuked it.
Recipes for baked goods will often call for you to “cream” the butter with sugar, then add eggs. This adds air bubbles, which expand when the leavening decomposes. Cold butter doesn’t cream well, resulting in flatter, crisper cookies.
No one would attempt to cream cold butter. Most recipes would specify that it be at room temperature. The use of cold butter results in “shorter” pastries not flatter, crispier pastries. The use of the cold butter is to make the pastry crumbly or layered.
I’ve seen people try. The OP said nothing about pastries. I did misremember the quote, the cookies will be “flat and dense.” If you don’t like that, take it up with Jack Bishop.
Exactly. That’s the whole theory behind make puff pastry (like in croissants.) If you’ve ever made puff pastry, you know that you have to keep things cold the whole way through. Essentially, what you do is make dozens to hundreds of layers (generally, it’s 81 or 283, depending on whether you do four or five sets of folds. Basically 3 to the power of how many sets of folds you do. Looking it up, I see people do up to seven sets, so 2187 layers). Anyhow, what you get is alternating ultrathin layers of dough and butter. When it cooks, the butter melts and the dough and butter release some steam and create little separations between each layer, giving the dough its signature flakiness. If the butter is melted and ends up incorporated in the dough, it doesn’t steam up and separate properly and you get a dense, non-flaky dough.
In your cookies, something related to this would be happening. The clumps of butter will create little pockets of steam, and you’ll get a flakier cookie. Whether this is something to be desired or not is up to your cookie preferences.
Never tried it with cookies, but I don’t think it would work very well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cookie recipe that didn’t call for creaming the butter and sugar together. I suppose one could use a pastry cutter, as noted up thread, but it seems like a lot of work when nearly everyone has a microwave.
As I said I have very little experience baking so I am not arguing here but just trying to get it all straight in my head.
My experience with these cookies was not flatter or flakier or more crisp. They were made to be big and gooey.
I dunno…you can see the recipe in action here. (I highly recommend the recipe…the cookies were delicious and, as I mentioned, a huge hit with everyone who tasted them…stand mixer is kinda necessary though if you follow the recipe exactly.)
Some good techniques in there, especially the admonition to not over-mix and to let the dough sit for a day or two. I use Penzey’s Baking Spice instead of cinnamon. I rarely make choc chip (usually opting for oatmeal/walnut/fruit), but when I do, I prefer to use chocolate féves (discs), preferably 70% cacao or better. Come to think of it, refrigerating the dough does make the butter hard, but since it’s been blended, there’s no harm done.
Yeah but after he browns the butter he refrigerates it again till it is solid and admonishes to not let it soften too much before blending it with the rest of the ingredients.
Not sure why that would be, as it’s going to be refrigerated again. I don’t see the chemical advantage to keeping it cold in cookies. Anyhow, next time I make my very famous oatmeal cookies, I’m going to try a couple of his techniques, particularly browning the butter a little and toasting the walnuts a bit.
I think it’s because if the butter is too soft you can’t cream it properly. Looking at the video, although he calls it “cold butter” after it’s been refrigerated for an hour, it doesn’t seem to be nearly as hard as butter straight from sitting in the fridge for a few days. Although I can’t tell for certain, it’s entirely possible that his “cold butter” is in fact the same consistency as butter left at room temperature to soften for 30-60 minutes.
