I’m not 100% happy with the way the recipe came out. In fact, I’m probably only about 50% satisfied. But I thought the results were interesting enough to share this with you guys.
To begin, I’ve never been a fan of soft chocolate chip cookies. Give me the thin and crispy ones anytime. When I worked in a little cafe, baking muffins and cookies, the owner wanted the dough cooked only til soft. Once I accidentally baked them crispy and got in trouble. Of course the problem was that she was under the impression that the difference between crispy cookies and soft cookies is that the soft ones are still half-raw, something I have never liked. Then, because there is still moisture inside, they dry out and get hard in a very unappealing way.
I recently saw an article in the Boston Globe about crispy chocolate chip cookies and soft ones. The recipes were different, decidedly so. The soft cookies had a recipe more like a brownie or cake. In other words, they had more flour and egg and less sugar.
The recipe I picked to make was the one on the back of the Ghiradelli bittersweet chocolate chip bag. Their recipes are too sweet and have too many chocolate chips for me, but still I didn’t bother to adjust that. As I no longer cook with butter, I substituted solid coconut oil for that. Since I like to play with flour substitutions, I usually just try whatever I feel like using. Today I replaced 1-1/8 cup of all-purpose flour with the following:
- 3/4 cup white rice flour
- 1/4 cup sweet rice flour
- 1/8 cup potato starch
- 1 teaspoon xanthan gum
The cookies are soft and chewy, while being properly browned on the bottom, and a little thick in the middle. They are in fact soft and chewy in a very, very good way.
I’ll be working on this again.
How do you find ways to subsitute, like flour and coconut oil. Also, is it cheaper?
I have been looking for ways to cook heathier and well, to be frank, for someone who has little knowledge of the kitchen, some recipes send my head just a-spinning.
Where to start really?
First of all, I’ve read a lot, and I’ve got a had a lot of experience baking (and training, too), so I have a feel for some of these things.
I also like to experiment, so sometimes I’ll hear about something and buy it, or I’ll see some ingredient I’ve never heard of with an interesting recipe on the package, and I’ll just buy it to see how it works.
Coconut oil is what lots of store-bought cookies used to be made from. It has lots of good properties. The cookies are…well, buttery in flavor and texture. It is very shelf-stable, which means they don’t get stale or rancid like liquid oils would without lots of preservatives. It’s gotten a bad health rep, which is undeserved, since the research which originally implicated it in health issues was faulty, in fact using a product that was chemically modified from naturally-occurring cocunut oils. Whole populations consume it daily and are completely healthy.
But for lots of things, there are tricks you can learn to save yourself learning the hard way. Coconut oil makes the best cookies, butterier than if you put real butter in. The coconut oil I get for baking I buy at Walmart, where it costs $2.67 for 31.5 ounces, an absolute bargain. To substitute into a recipe, use a little less coconut oil than butter, maybe 10% less, as butter contains water as well as fat.
As far as substuting flours is concerned, this is something I do because I can’t eat wheat and have to make substitutions. I probably would stick to unbleached white flour and whole wheat flour if I was still able to eat that, except for some recipes that call for a different flour for a special effect.