Bear Flag Blog

I make chocolate chip cookies. Not frequently but often enough that I have memorized the recipe; which recipe, by the way, is simply the Toll House recipe that appears on the back of every bag of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips. One of the things I learned from my mother is that there is no better recipe. She tried many chocolate chip recipes over many years, and none of them were ever superior to the Toll House recipe that appears on the bag of chocolate chips.

So - put two cubes of butter in a bowl to soften. Once the butter is soft, add three quarter cups of white sugar, three quarter cups of brown sugar, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Stir. (By hand if you are a real man, like me, or with a blender if you are a real cook.) Add an egg, stir. Add a second egg, stir. Add a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of baking soda (not baking powder), and a cup and a quarter of white all-purpose flour. Stir. Add a second cup of white all-purpose flour. Stir again. Add a bag of chocolate chips. Stir. Splat spoonfuls onto a cookie pan, stick it in the oven for ten minutes, and viola! Cookies.

So that's the recipe. However! The purpose of this column is not to disburse my top secret chocolate chip cookie recipe. Oh no. It is instead to reveal the results of a scientific experiment I very successfully concluded regarding these selfsame chocolate chip cookies.

I had heard, from numerous sources, that the Secret(tm) to really good chocolate chip cookies was not, in fact, the recipe - but rather the Secret is to let the dough "rest", for at least 36 hours after making it. The theory being that at a molecular level butter and sugar and flour don't really bond all that well just from being whipped up together. It takes time for them to penetrate eachother and become a true unified dough, rather than a collection of ingredients. So one should make one's cookie dough and then let it rest (in the refrigerator, you are using raw eggs remember) for at least 36 hours before baking it, to give the ingredients time to truly blend.

So I did this. I made cookie dough on Friday evening, and left it in the refrigerator until Sunday. Then, on Sunday, I made more cookie dough. And I baked it all. Each batch that went into the oven had half cookie made with rested dough, and half with fresh dough. The cookies then went onto separate cooling racks. And on Monday, I took them into work, rounded up twenty or so co-workers, and demanded that they each eat one cookie from tray A and one from tray B and tell me if they could tell a difference, and if so, which cookie was superior.

...

The results were, as results often are, mixed. Everyone liked both cookies. Most people did not find one superior to the other; when a choice was demanded, the split was 55% to 45% in favor of the "rested" dough cookies.

There were, however, some tasters who actually had a strong preference. Of my twenty tasters, five strongly preferred one type of dough to the other (although, as I say, they also liked the other type). Three of them preferred the rested dough, two the fresh dough.

So it's basically a wash. Conclusions:

1) Chocolate chip cookies are good regardless of dough resting time.
2) Most people do not prefer one type to the other.
3) That said, some people do have a strong preference - and it may be in your interest, if you make cookies, to discover whether or not you are one of those people.

I myself am able to tell the difference in taste, although I find that I enjoy both sorts of cookies equally. The fresh dough cookies do taste a little more of ingredients: a little touch of baking soda, a tiny taste of egg. The rested dough cookies are a more uniform dough taste.

However, resting the dough takes a day and a half. If I want cookies, generally I want them now; and given that I have left the butter out to soften, it takes less than half an hour from mixing the first ingredients until I am eating an oven-warm cookie. So I suspect that, in the future, I may rest my dough from time to time, but generally I'll use fresh. I like the taste just as well.