• Date: October 19, 2018
• Location: Remington Row Party Room
• Participants: Anderson, Chris, Dzhuliya, Elaine, Emily, Heather, Jessica, Jo, Jon, Keira, Matt B., Rachel, Roberto

Introduction

We wanted to explore the parameters that make a chocolate cookie good.

Method

Recipes

We started with a base recipe, Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies by Michael Chu, and then modified one aspect of the recipe at a time. The base recipe turns the classic Tollhouse recipe (found on the back of the chocolate chips) into weights. It would be difficult for one person to make all the varieties we wanted to test, and therefore each participant was in charge of baking one of the cookie variations. This introduced an uncontrolled variable in that each cookie was baked in a different oven. There was also an attempt to control the size of the cookies, but this was also difficult to implement and each cookie variation had a different size.

Bakers were given the following guidelines:

General Rules – Cookies should follow the same basic recipe (Tollhouse) and not deviate from them except for the specified change. Please bake the cookies at least 2 hours before the event, but no more than 1-1.5 days before the event. We all know warm cookies are far superior, so no warm cookies will be allowed. Store in a container if making the day before to try and preserve them as best we can. If we can stick to the same brands, that will take away some bias, but if you have an excess amount of one thing already, don’t worry about it. Flour: King Arthur All Purpose. Domino white sugar and light brown sugar. Land-o-lakes UNSALTED! butter. Crisco vegetable shortening (when used). Nestle tollhouse SEMI-SWEET chocolate chips. Large eggs. Salt should be fine grain, not sea salt, etc. All cookies should be about 1 inch balls when placed on cookie sheet – don’t over-crowd! Unless making the nuts recipe, don’t add the nuts in the recipes.

Below is the list of the modifications that were made.

All brown sugar

1 1/2 c. packed brown sugar. 0 c. granulated sugar (325g brown sugar, 0 g white)

1 egg, 1c. milk & extra flour¹

Beat egg, milk, and sugars together. added 280 g flour lol ok that was way too much flour i think.

Store-bought Tollhouse Dough

in case you are an awful baker

Alton Brown²

Alton Brown’s recipe

Walnuts

Add walnuts in addition to the chips

Cake flour & b. powder; no b. soda²

Cake flour along with 1 teaspoon of baking powder instead of 1 teaspoon baking soda

All white sugar

1 1/2c. granulated sugar. 0c. brown sugar (300g white, 0g brown)

Salted Butter

Use salted, instead of unsalted, butter.

All shortening

1 c. shortening instead of butter. (room temp)

Chilled Dough

After mixing, chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour.

Mini chocolate chips

Splitting the nut batter even more to get some mini chocolate chips in there

Cocoa Powder

1/2 cup of cocoa powder (~42g)

Betty Crocker

Recipe from cookbook published circa 1935.

Chunks

Chopped chocolate chunks instead of chips

Extra flour

Add 1/4 cup more flour (~33 more grams)

Classic Tollhouse

Found on the chocolate chip cookie bag.

1/2 shortening 1/2 butter

0.5c. shortening and 0.5c. room temp butter

Melted Butter

Melt butter before adding to sugars. Cool slightly.

Tasting

In standard Science Saturday fashion, everyone was assigned a buddy to serve cookies and track scores. The order the cookies were eaten in was randomly assigned, so no one ate the cookies in the same order. All participants were blindfolded while tasting the cookies. People were given half of a cookie to eat, and could eat as much or as little of it as they wanted. Some people would only take one bite which might have highly biased the chocolatey and sweetness results. Some cookies that Rachel made weren’t able to be broken in half because of their small size and being baked longer than some of the others, so in those cases a full cookie was given. People were allowed to talk and give there numbers (rather than holding up fingers) because there were so many parameters we were judging and all of the orders were random.

• Personal preference
  1. ⚰️
  2. 🤮
  3. 😰
  4. 🤷‍♀️
  5. 🤤
  6. 🤯
• Appearance
  1. Probably not
  2. Would eat
  3. Martha Stewart level
• Bite
  1. Very Crunchy
  2. Crunchy
  3. Chewy
  4. Cakey
• Chococlateness
  1. Not Choc.
  2. Choc.
  3. Too (Very) Choc.
• Moistness
  1. Dry
  2. Neutral
  3. Moist
• Sweetness
  1. Not Sweet
  2. Sweet
  3. Super Sweet

Results

The chocolatey was very much biased by the bite of cookie that you took, and a lot of people only took 1 bite.