The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie
Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
Since Nestlé first printed the recipe for Toll House cookies on the back of chocolate chip bags in 1939, generations of cooks have packed them into lunches, taken them to bake sales, and kept them on hand for snacking—arguably more so than any other kind of cookie. I’ve also made countless batches over the years. The recipe is easy: Cream butter and sugar (half white, half brown), add two eggs and vanilla, and mix in all-purpose flour, salt, baking soda, some chopped nuts, and the chips. Drop tablespoons of dough on a cookie sheet, bake at 375 for 10 minutes, and you’re done.
With its cakey texture and sweet, buttery flavor, the Toll House cookie certainly has its appeal. But in my opinion, a truly great cookie offers real complexity. My ideal has always been a cookie that’s moist and chewy on the inside and crisp at the edges, with deep notes of toffee and butterscotch to balance its sweetness. Could I achieve the perfect specimen?
NOT-SO-COOKIE-CUTTER TECHNIQUES
I’m not the first to think the Toll House cookie could stand improvement. The New York Times published a recipe inspired by famed New York City pastry chef Jacques Torres trumpeting an unusual tactic for creating more complex flavor: letting the dough rest for a full 24 hours before baking. The rest enables the flour to fully absorb moisture from the eggs, leading to drier dough that, theoretically, caramelizes more quickly in the oven and achieves richer flavor. When I tried the recipe, tasters found that it did have a slightly deeper toffee taste than the Toll House cookie—but not nearly enough to warrant the inconvenience of a 24-hour rest.
Several Boston-area bakeries employ their own dough-resting techniques: Joanne Chang at Flour Bakery swears by a rest of two or three days. At Clear Flour Bread, they portion and freeze the dough before baking, a trick that prevents the dough from spreading too much (and that keeps the center of the cookie moist and chewy). These are fine ideas for professional bakers but impractical for time-pressed home cooks.
Other pastry chefs rely on “pet” ingredients. Following the lead of Christina Tosi at Manhattan’s Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar, I added milk powder to one batch. Tosi finds that it brings depth; I found that it made the cookies taste milky. I also experimented with tapioca powder, brown rice flour, and xanthan gum for chew. In each case, tasters were unanimous: No thanks.
I wasn’t having luck on the flavor or chewiness front, but an approach for increasing crispiness from the Toll House creator herself, Ruth Wakefield, seemed worth trying: In a variation on her chocolate chip cookie recipe published in Toll House Tried and True Recipes (1940), Wakefield swaps all-purpose flour for cake flour. But the swap yielded a cookie so crumbly that it practically disintegrated after one bite, since cake flour has less protein than all-purpose flour. Protein is one of the building blocks of gluten, which gives baked goods their structure. The less protein, the less structure, and thus the more crumbly the end product.
EXAMINING THE ELEMENTS
It was time to come up with my own ideas. Since small tweaks in a baking recipe can translate into big differences, I would break down the Toll House recipe and see what changes I could invoke by playing around with ingredients and proportions.
I decided to start by tackling texture, first zeroing in on the impact of the fat. I knew that I wanted to stick with butter—vegetable shortening and oil could never compete with its rich flavor. The Toll House recipe calls for creaming the butter with the sugar, which creates tiny air bubbles that bring a cakey lift to cookies. When developing a recipe for Brown Sugar Cookies, I discovered that melting the butter before combining it with the other ingredients led to a chewier texture. Butter contains up to 18 percent water. When butter melts, the water separates from the fat and interacts with the proteins in flour to create more structure-enhancing gluten. Melting the butter created a relative abundance of water (more than 3 tablespoons), for cookies that tasters found noticeably chewier. And since I was melting butter, I saw an opportunity to brown it, a technique that can add nutty flavor. Sure enough, it worked. But since browning burns off some of butter’s moisture, I made sure not to brown all of it.
Next ingredient: sugar. Besides adding sweetness, sugar affects texture. White sugar lends crispiness, while brown sugar, which is hygroscopic (meaning it attracts and retains water), enhances chewiness. Cookies made with all brown sugar were nearly floppy. I got the best results when I simply used a bit more brown sugar than granulated.
For cookies that are crisp at the edges and chewy in the middle, we up the ratio of brown sugar and let the batter rest before baking.
Next came flour. I already knew that cake flour wouldn’t work. What if I tried bread flour, with its higher protein content? This was going too far: The cookies were dense and chewy. In the end, cutting back on the all-purpose flour by ½ cup allowed the chewiness contributed by the brown sugar to come to the fore. The only problem: With less flour, the cookies were a little greasy. To resolve the issue, I decreased the butter by 2 tablespoons.
Finally, I was ready to evaluate the role of eggs. I knew from experience that egg whites, which contain much of the protein in the egg, tend to create cakey texture in baked goods—not what I was after. What’s more, as the cookies bake, any white that isn’t fully absorbed in the batter readily dries out, which can leave a cookie crumbly. Eliminating one egg white resulted in cookies that were supremely moist and chewy.
WAITING FOR BETTER FLAVOR
I had achieved chewiness, but the crisp edges and deep toffee flavor were still missing. That’s when batch number 43 came along.
In the middle of stirring together the butter, sugar, and eggs, I stopped to take a phone call. Ten minutes later, the sugars had dissolved and the mixture had turned thick and shiny. I didn’t think much of it until I pulled the finished cookies from the oven. Instead of having the smooth, matte surface of the previous batches, these emerged with a glossy sheen and an alluring craggy surface. One bite revealed deep, toffee-like flavor. And these cookies finally had just the texture I was aiming for: crisp on the outside and chewy within. When I made the cookies bigger (3 tablespoons versus the single tablespoon called for in the Toll House recipe), the contrast was even greater.
Our science editor theorized that allowing the sugar to rest in the liquids meant that more of it dissolved before baking. The dissolved sugar caramelizes more easily, creating toffee flavors and influencing texture. I kept the resting period, maximizing the effect with some occasional whisking.
Now I just had to finesse the baking time and temperature. With caramelization in mind, I kept the oven hot: 375 degrees, the same as for Toll House cookies. Watching the oven carefully, I baked the cookies until they were golden brown, just set at the edges, and soft in the center, between 10 and 14 minutes.
After more than 700 cookies baked, my cookies were crisp and chewy and gooey with chocolate, with a complex medley of sweet, buttery, toffee flavors. I held one more blind tasting, pitting my cookie against the Toll House classic. The verdict? My cookies weren’t just better—they were perfect.
Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies
MAKES 16 COOKIES
Avoid using a nonstick skillet to brown the butter; the dark color of the nonstick coating makes it difficult to gauge when the butter is sufficiently browned. Use fresh, moist brown sugar instead of hardened brown sugar, which will make the cookies dry.
1¾ cups (8¾ ounces) all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
14 tablespoons unsalted butter
¾ cup packed (5¼ ounces) dark brown sugar
½ cup (3½ ounces) granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
1 large egg plus 1 large yolk
1¼ cups (7½ ounces) semisweet chocolate chips or chunks
¾ cup pecans or walnuts, toasted and chopped (optional)
1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour and baking soda together in medium bowl; set aside.
2. Melt 10 tablespoons butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Continue to cook, swirling pan constantly, until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl. Add remaining 4 tablespoons butter and stir until completely melted.
3. Add brown sugar, granulated sugar, vanilla, and salt to melted butter; whisk until fully incorporated. Add egg and yolk; whisk until mixture is smooth with no sugar lumps remaining, about 30 seconds. Let mixture stand for 3 minutes, then whisk for 30 seconds. Repeat process of resting and whisking 2 more times until mixture is thick, smooth, and shiny. Using rubber spatula, stir in flour mixture until just combined, about 1 minute. Stir in chocolate chips and pecans, if using. Give dough final stir to ensure no flour pockets remain and ingredients are evenly distributed.
4. Working with 3 tablespoons dough at a time, roll into balls and space them 2 inches apart on prepared sheets. Bake, 1 sheet at a time, until cookies are golden brown, still puffy, and edges have begun to set but centers are soft, 10 to 14 minutes, rotating sheet halfway through baking. Let cookies cool completely on sheets on wire racks before serving. (Cookies can be stored in zipperlock bag for up to 3 days.)
DON’T BAKE TWO TRAYS AT ONCE
Baking two trays at a time may be convenient, but it leads to uneven cooking. The cookies on the top tray are often browner around the edges than those on the bottom, even when rotated halfway through cooking.
TOP RACK
BOTTOM RACK
Why does the man on the Quaker oatmeal package look so smug? Maybe it’s because he’s the cunning perpetrator of a wildly successful cookie con. The evidence is anecdotal but persuasive: When I asked several friends to share their favorite family recipe for oatmeal cookies, many produced (often unbeknownst to them) the recipe from the Quaker Oatmeal website, Quaker’s Best Oatmeal Cookies. The guy on the canister has apparently cornered the market, but do his cookies really deserve all the love?
The recipe goes like this: Use a mixer to cream the butter and sugar and then add an egg and some vanilla. Stir in some flour, leavening, salt (oddly optional in this recipe), spices (a generous amount), and old-fashioned rolled oats, and then spoon the mixture onto baking sheets. As they bake, the cookies fill the house with the heady scents of butter and cinnamon.
Replacing some of the butter in our oatmeal cookies with vegetable oil and adding an egg yolk creates great chew.
One bite of a cooled cookie, though, and the problems were apparent: The Quaker standby was crumbly at the edges and dry and cakey in the middle. Plus, the abundant spices overpowered the subtle flavor of the oats. I wanted a cookie with a crispy edge; a dense, chewy middle; and true oaty flavor. I was confident I could attain these goals and, in doing so, topple the oatmeal cookie kingpin. But I wasn’t above using his recipe as a starting point.
MIXED UP
I planned to make the salt mandatory instead of optional and to tone down the spices, but other than that I saw no reason to change the key ingredients in the Quaker recipe at this point—they each played a role—so I turned my attention to the ingredient proportions.
Most of those seemed OK, too. Only one, the 2½ sticks of butter, stood out as scandalously extravagant. The only cookie I know that has such a high proportion of butter to flour is shortbread, and that was definitely not the texture I was after. Instead, I placed a more reasonable 1½ sticks of softened butter in the mixer bowl. The brown sugar, granulated sugar, egg, vanilla, flour, and baking soda amounts all remained the same. But because I wanted just a hint of spice, I cut the cinnamon back to a mere ¼ teaspoon and eliminated the nutmeg altogether.
All was going well until it was time to add the oats. The mixture was simply too dry to accommodate all of them; I ended up with something that resembled crumble topping more than it did cookie dough.
I abandoned that batch and started over, keeping the butter to 1½ sticks but reducing the flour to 1 cup. This worked better: The cookies weren’t as dry, and with less flour in the mix, the flavor of the oats stood out more.
Unfortunately, these cookies tasted a bit tinny. They also seemed rather lean, and the cakey texture remained. The metallic flavor, I knew, was coming from the baking soda—a full teaspoon was too much for the reduced amount of flour, especially now that there wasn’t as much spice to hide behind. The excess soda might have been contributing to the cakey texture, too, but I suspected something else was at play.
The whole point of creaming butter and sugar when baking is to seed the softened butter with millions of tiny air bubbles. When the alkaline leavener reacts with acidic ingredients in the dough to produce carbon dioxide, the gas inflates the air bubbles, producing a light texture. If I wanted flatter, less cakey cookies, I probably didn’t need—or want—the mixer.
But combining the butter and sugar by hand sounded like a chore. Then it occurred to me: If I wasn’t whipping air into it, there was no need for the butter to be solid. Instead, I melted it. Eliminating the creaming step made the recipe easier and, along with cutting the baking soda amount in half, produced cookies that were flatter and denser in a good way. They were still a bit lean, but I didn’t want to increase the butter because of the textural issues, so I’d need to enrich them in another way. And they still weren’t as chewy as I wanted.
FAT FACTOR
Luckily, I had some experience with making baked goods chewy, having developed our recipe for Chewy Brownies. The key lies in the chemistry of fats. Both saturated fats (such as butter) and unsaturated fats (such as vegetable oil) consist of long chains of carbon atoms strung together with hydrogen atoms attached to them. The carbon chains in saturated fats have the maximum number of hydrogen atoms attached, so they can pack together more closely into a solid like butter. Unsaturated fats have fewer hydrogen atoms attached, so the chains pack more loosely and thus remain fluid, like vegetable oil. The right combination of loosely and tightly packed chains will produce the ideal chewy texture. When developing my brownie recipe, I learned that 3 parts unsaturated fat to 1 part saturated fat was the magic ratio.
Would the same hold true for my oatmeal cookies? With 12 tablespoons of butter (which is mostly saturated fat) and 1 egg, the fat in my recipe was currently 35 percent unsaturated and 65 percent saturated. For my next batch of cookies, I switched out 8 tablespoons of butter for ½ cup of vegetable oil. I also added an extra egg yolk for richness. Now the cookies had 71 percent unsaturated fat and 29 percent saturated, which was much closer to that 3:1 ideal.
So how were they? Crispy on the edges and chewy in the middle, the texture was at last spot-on. But with so much of the butter replaced by neutral-tasting vegetable oil, they were a bit bland and boring. The recipe would need a few more tweaks.
If I had only 4 tablespoons of butter to work with, I was determined to get as much flavor out of it as I could, so I cooked it in a skillet until it was fragrant and the milk solids had turned a dark golden brown before transferring it to the mixing bowl. And rather than increasing the amount of cinnamon, I added the ¼ teaspoon to the warm browned butter to let it bloom, making its flavor rounder and more complex. Correct seasoning is every bit as important in sweets as it is in savory dishes; for my last adjustment, I bumped up the salt to ¾ teaspoon.
The three tweaks were, in combination, surprisingly effective. My cookies now had not only the right texture but also a rich, toasty flavor: buttery, sweet oats with a subtle spice background. A small handful of raisins stirred into the last batch of dough added pops of bright flavor and reinforced the cookies’ chew. Knowing that they’re a controversial addition, I kept them optional in the recipe.
The Quaker guy no longer has the best recipe, so I guess I’ll have to come up with another reason for his smug expression now. Maybe it’s the hat.
Classic Chewy Oatmeal Cookies
MAKES 20 COOKIES
Regular old-fashioned rolled oats work best in this recipe. Do not use extra-thick rolled oats; they will bake up tough in the cookies. For cookies with just the right amount of spread and chew, we strongly recommend that you weigh your ingredients. If you omit the raisins, the recipe will yield 18 cookies.
1 cup (5 ounces) all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¾ cup packed (5¼ ounces) dark brown sugar
½ cup (3½ ounces) granulated sugar
½ cup vegetable oil
1 large egg plus 1 large yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups (9 ounces) old-fashioned rolled oats
½ cup raisins (optional)
1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour, salt, and baking soda together in medium bowl; set aside.
2. Melt butter in 8-inch skillet over medium-high heat, swirling pan occasionally, until foaming subsides. Continue to cook, stirring and scraping bottom of pan with heat-resistant spatula, until milk solids are dark golden brown and butter has nutty aroma, 1 to 2 minutes. Immediately transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl, scraping skillet with spatula. Stir in cinnamon.
3. Add brown sugar, granulated sugar, and oil to bowl with butter and whisk until combined. Add egg and yolk and vanilla and whisk until mixture is smooth. Using wooden spoon or spatula, stir in flour mixture until fully combined, about 1 minute. Add oats and raisins, if using, and stir until evenly distributed (mixture will be stiff).
4. Divide dough into 20 portions, each about 3 tablespoons (or use #24 scoop). Arrange dough balls 2 inches apart on prepared sheets, 10 dough balls per sheet. Using your damp hand, press each ball into 2½-inch disk.
5. Bake, 1 sheet at a time, until cookie edges are set and lightly browned and centers are still soft but not wet, 8 to 10 minutes, rotating sheet halfway through baking. Let cookies cool on sheet on wire rack for 5 minutes; using wide metal spatula, transfer cookies to wire rack and let cool completely before serving.
FOR A CHEWY COOKIE, CUT THE (SATURATED) FAT
When our cookies were coming out cakey and tender rather than dense and chewy, we knew to look at the fat—specifically, the types of fat we were using and their proportion to each other. More saturated fat (e.g., butter) will produce baked goods with a tender texture, while more unsaturated fat (e.g., vegetable oil) leads to a chewier baked good. We were using all butter up to this point, so swapping in vegetable oil for some of that butter (and adding another egg yolk) gave us a ratio of about 3 parts unsaturated fat to 1 part saturated—and cookies that met our chewy, dense ideal.
NO MIXER? NO NEED
A lot of oatmeal cookie recipes, including Quaker’s Best Oatmeal Cookies, call for using a mixer, but we realized that hauling one out was not only unnecessary but even counterproductive. Mixers are great for incorporating air into cake batters, but that’s exactly what you don’t want for a dense, chewy oatmeal cookie. So we skipped the mixer and simply stirred our dough together in a bowl. And since we didn’t need to whip air into the butter, there was no reason for it to stay in solid form. Melting it made for easier mixing and also gave us the chance to brown it for a flavor boost that enhanced the oaty flavor.
ANDREA GEARY, November/December 2010
The first challenge for every prospective test cook at Cook’s Illustrated is to bake a batch of chewy sugar cookies under the watchful eye of the test kitchen director. The task looks simple enough: Cream the fat with sugar; mix in egg and vanilla, followed by the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, and leavener); roll balls of dough in sugar; and bake. But more often than not, the resulting cookies range from stunted and humped to flat and brittle, with smooth rather than crackly tops. With no nuts, raisins, or chunks of chocolate to provide distraction, such flaws become all the more glaring. Indeed, the sugar cookie has been the downfall of many a hopeful applicant.
The truth is, making a just-right version of this humble cookie is far from easy. I was determined to engineer a recipe that would produce my ideal, every time: crisp at the edges, soft and chewy in the center, crackly-crisp on top—and, of course, richly flavorful.
WHY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES
I already had a leg up in the chewiness department. While developing our recipe for Chewy Brownies, I learned that the key to a truly chewy texture is all in the fat. For optimal chew, a recipe must contain both saturated and unsaturated fat in a ratio of approximately 1 to 3. When combined, the two types of fat molecules form a sturdier crystalline structure that requires more force to chew through than the structure formed from a high proportion of saturated fats.
Right away I could eliminate the majority of recipes I’d found in my research; almost all called for butter alone. Butter is predominantly—but not entirely—a saturated fat, and an all-butter cookie actually contains approximately 2 parts saturated fat to 1 part unsaturated fat. For optimal chew, I needed to reverse that ratio and then some.
I got to work adjusting the fat in the recipe that I’d singled out as a baseline for “soft and chewy” sugar cookies. I knocked down the recipe’s 8 ounces (16 tablespoons) of butter to 3 ounces (6 tablespoons) and added 5 ounces of mostly unsaturated vegetable oil, which gave me a fat content that was approximately 25 percent saturated and 75 percent unsaturated.
With so little butter in the recipe, there was not enough solid fat to hold the air, so creaming it with the sugar no longer made sense. Instead, I melted the butter and whisked it with the sugar. This simple switch proved to be a boon in more ways than one. First, it eliminated one of the trickier aspects of baking sugar cookies: ensuring that the solid butter is just the right temperature. Second, melted butter would aid in my quest for chewiness: When liquefied, the small amount of water in butter mixes with the flour to form gluten, which makes for chewier cookies. Finally, with creaming out of the equation, I’d no longer need to pull out my stand mixer; I could mix all the ingredients by hand.
But there was a downside to swapping butter for oil. The two doses of liquid fat made the dough so soft that it was practically pourable. Plus, now that I was no longer creaming, there wasn’t enough air in the dough, and the cookies were baking up too flat. I spent the next several tests readjusting my ingredients. More flour helped build up structure, while another ½ teaspoon of baking powder added lift. To keep the cookies from being too dry and biscuitlike, I ramped up the sugar, salt, and vanilla and added a tiny bit of milk.
With this new formula, the chewiness of my cookies was spot-on. But I still had a few problems, two of which were mainly cosmetic: The cookies had gone from too flat to a bit more domed than I liked, and they didn’t have much of that appealingly crackly top that makes a sugar cookie distinctive. But most important, trading more than half the rich butter for neutral-tasting vegetable oil had plagued the cookies with a one-dimensional sweetness.
SUGAR FIX
There was no use reducing the amount of sugar: Given the choice between blandness and one-note sweetness, I’d take the latter. Instead, I wondered if I could add something to take the edge off all that sugariness. I thought an acidic ingredient like lemon juice or zest might work. But such assertive citrus flavor took the cookies out of the “sugar” category and dropped them squarely into the lemon family. We often add buttermilk, sour cream, or yogurt to muffins and cakes to round out their flavors. But when I tried each of these in place of the milk in my recipe, I couldn’t add more than a tablespoon of any one before it upset the precarious moisture balance, leading to dough that was too soft.
The secret to achieving balanced sweetness in our sugar cookies is adding a little bit of cream cheese.
I scanned the supermarket dairy aisle and zeroed in on cream cheese, wondering if it would enrich the dough’s flavor without adding much liquid. Of course, the trade-off would be my perfect chewiness ratio: Cream cheese has less than one-third the fat of vegetable oil, but most of it is saturated. With every ounce I added, I would be chipping away at my carefully calibrated ratio of fats, so I traded 1 ounce of oil for a modest 2 ounces of cream cheese. The saturated-fat content increased from 25 percent to 32 percent—and I was thrilled to find that the difference didn’t markedly affect the cookies’ texture. But flavorwise, the effect of the cream cheese was dramatic, and my tasters’ faces lit up as they bit into this latest batch.
There was more good news: With acidic cream cheese in the mix, I could now add baking soda to the dough. As long as there’s an acidic ingredient present, baking soda has all sorts of special powers, including the ability to solve my other two pesky problems: slightly humped cookies and not enough crackle. Just ½ teaspoon produced cookies that looked as good as they tasted.
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED
The recipe was in good shape: The butter-oil combination led to satisfying chew, the liquid fats made the dough easy to mix by hand, the cream cheese provided a subtle contrast to the sugar, and the baking soda ensured a crackly top and a nicely rounded shape. But when a friend tried it out, I was dismayed to find that her cookies spread all over the pan to form one giant confection.
I asked her to walk me through her process—and realized I’d taken a crucial test kitchen technique for granted. When baking, we measure our ingredients by weight, but like many home cooks, my friend had measured hers by volume. In the past, we’ve found that weights of volume-measured ingredients can vary by as much as 20 percent, a particular hazard when too little flour is measured. While a bit too much flour isn’t a catastrophe, too little means more flour proteins get coated in fat and can’t form structure-building gluten. The result: cookies that spread and bake up flat. For a truly foolproof recipe, I needed to provide some wiggle room. The solution turned out to be as simple as cutting back a little on the fat, so there would never be too much to go around. Reducing the butter was out of the question—I didn’t want to lose its rich flavor. Instead, I took the oil down from ½ cup to ⅓ cup.
This change, of course, rejiggered my fat ratios, with the saturated fat now totaling 36 percent and the unsaturated fat 64 percent—closer to a 1:2 ratio than a 1:3 ratio, but still almost the reverse of the all-butter recipe I began with. Happily, while the cookies were not quite as chewy as before, they still had far more chew than any sugar cookie I’d ever eaten.
The only outstanding problem? With such an easy, truly foolproof chewy sugar cookie recipe on record, the test kitchen director will have to find something more challenging to spring on job applicants.
MAKES ABOUT 24 COOKIES
The final dough will be slightly softer than most cookie doughs. For best results, handle the dough as briefly and gently as possible when shaping the cookies. Overworking the dough will result in flatter cookies.
2¼ cups (11¼ ounces) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1½ cups (10½ ounces) sugar, plus ⅓ cup for rolling
2 ounces cream cheese, cut into 8 pieces
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and still warm
⅓ cup vegetable oil
1 large egg
1 tablespoon whole milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in medium bowl. Set aside.
2. Place 1½ cups sugar and cream cheese in large bowl. Spread remaining ⅓ cup sugar in shallow dish and set aside. Pour melted butter over sugar and cream cheese and whisk to combine (some small lumps of cream cheese will remain). Whisk in oil until incorporated. Add egg, milk, and vanilla; continue to whisk until smooth. Add flour mixture and mix with rubber spatula until soft, homogeneous dough forms.
3. Working with 2 tablespoons dough at a time, roll into balls. Working in batches, roll half of dough balls in sugar in shallow dish to coat, then space them evenly on prepared sheet. Repeat with remaining dough balls and second prepared sheet. Using bottom of greased measuring cup, flatten dough balls until 2 inches in diameter. Sprinkle tops of cookies evenly with sugar remaining in shallow dish, using 2 teaspoons for each sheet. (Discard remaining sugar.)
4. Bake, 1 sheet at a time, until edges of cookies are set and just beginning to brown, 11 to 13 minutes, rotating sheet halfway through baking. Let cookies cool on sheet for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack and let cool completely before serving.
variations
Chewy Chai-Spice Sugar Cookies
Add ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon, ¼ teaspoon ground ginger, ¼ teaspoon ground cardamom, ¼ teaspoon ground cloves, and pinch pepper to sugar–cream cheese mixture and reduce vanilla to 1 teaspoon.
Chewy Coconut-Lime Sugar Cookies
Whisk ½ cup sweetened shredded coconut, chopped fine, into flour mixture in step 1. Add 1 teaspoon finely grated lime zest to sugar–cream cheese mixture and substitute 1 tablespoon lime juice for vanilla.
SECRET WEAPONS FOR TASTE AND TEXTURE
Sugar cookies can be cloyingly sweet, and are rarely chewy. These two ingredients helped us create the best flavor and chewy texture.
CREAM CHEESE Cream cheese is an ingredient not often included in sugar cookies. But we found that it helps cut their one-note sweetness and round out their flavors.
OIL All-butter sugar cookies may have rich taste, but they never boast real chew. Swapping some of the butter, which is mainly a saturated fat, for unsaturated vegetable oil boosts chewiness considerably. Why? The two types of fat create a sturdier structure that requires more force to chew through.
I’m not one for fancy cookies. No special nuts, exotic flavor extracts, or intricate decorating for me. I prefer simple cookies done well. Take sugar cookies, for example: Made of nothing more than butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and leavener, they’re rich and buttery with a crisp sugary exterior. Big results from pantry ingredients…now that’s what I like.
But a sugar cookie can seem too simple—even dull—at times. I love the butterscotch, vanilla, and caramel flavors that brown sugar gives coffee cakes and other baked goods. Could I replace the granulated sugar in a sugar cookie with brown sugar and create a simple cookie that was actually exciting? I had a clear vision of this cookie. It would be oversized, with a crackling crisp exterior and a chewy interior. And, like Mick Jagger, this cookie would scream “brown sugar.”
I found a half-dozen recipes and got to work. Although they looked similar on paper, the baked cookies ranged in style from bite-size puffs with a soft, cakey texture to thin disks with a short crumb. This first round of testing reminded me that cookies are deceptively difficult. Yes, most recipes can be executed by a young child, but even the tiniest alteration will make a significant difference in flavor and, especially, texture. To construct my ideal brown sugar cookie, I would need to brush up on the science of cookie making.
BASIC COOKIE CONSTRUCTION
Most sugar cookie recipes start by creaming softened butter with sugar until fluffy, beating in an egg or two, and then adding the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, and salt). Vanilla is often incorporated along the way.
Butter was the obvious choice for optimal flavor, but creaming the fat and sugar beat tiny air bubbles into the dough and the resulting cookies were cakey and tender—not what I had in mind. I tried cutting the butter into the flour (like you do when making pie dough), but this method produced crumbly cookies with a texture akin to shortbread. When I melted the butter, the cookies finally had the chewy texture I wanted.
So why does melted butter make chewy cookies? Butter is actually 20 percent water and 80 percent fat. When melted, the water and fat separate and the proteins in the flour absorb some of the water and begin to form gluten, the protein that gives baked goods, including breads, their structure and chew.
Cookies made with melted butter and an entire 1-pound box of brown sugar had plenty of flavor, but these taffy-textured confections threatened to pull out my expensive dental work. Using dark brown sugar rather than light brown sugar allowed me to get more flavor from less sugar. Cookies made with 1¾ cups dark brown sugar had the best texture and decent flavor. I decided to nail down the rest of my recipe before circling back to flavor issues.
Browning the butter enhances the deep flavor of brown sugar; rolling the dough balls in more brown sugar adds additional flavor and texture.
Eggs add richness and structure to cookies. A single egg didn’t provide enough of the latter—the cookies were too candy-like. Thinking that two eggs would solve the problem, I was surprised when a test batch turned out dry and cakey. Splitting the difference, I added one whole egg plus a yolk and was pleased with the results.
Too much flour gave the cookies a homogeneous texture; too little and that candy-like chew reemerged. Two cups flour, plus a couple extra tablespoons, was the perfect match for the amounts of butter, sugar, and egg I’d chosen.
The choice of leavener is probably the most confusing part of any cookie recipe. Sugar cookies typically contain baking powder—a mixture of baking soda and a weak acid (calcium acid phosphate) that is activated by moisture and heat. The soda and acid create gas bubbles, which expand cookies and other baked goods. However, many baked goods with brown sugar call for baking soda. While granulated sugar is neutral, dark brown sugar can be slightly acidic. When I used baking soda by itself, the cookies had an open, coarse crumb and craggy top. Tasters loved the craggy top but not the coarse crumb. When I used baking powder by itself, the cookies had a finer, tighter crumb but the craggy top disappeared. After a dozen rounds of testing, I found that ¼ teaspoon of baking powder mixed with ½ teaspoon of baking soda moderated the coarseness of the crumb without compromising the craggy tops.
BROWNING AROUND
I had now developed a good cookie, but could I eke out even more brown sugar flavor? Riffing off a classic sugar cookie technique, I tried rolling the dough balls in brown sugar before baking them. The brown sugar clumped in some spots, but overall the crackling sugar exterior added good crunch and flavor. Cutting the brown sugar with granulated sugar solved the clumping problem.
To further ramp up the brown sugar flavor, I tested maple syrup, molasses, and vanilla extract. The maple and molasses were overpowering and masked the cookies’ butterscotch flavor, but 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract properly reinforced the brown sugar flavor. A healthy dose of table salt (½ teaspoon) balanced the sweetness and helped accentuate the more interesting flavor components in brown sugar. But my biggest success came from an unlikely refinement.
Browned butter sauces add nutty flavor to delicate fish and pasta dishes. I wondered if browning the melted butter would add the same nutty flavor to my cookies. My tasters thought the complex nuttiness added by the browned butter made a substantial difference.
I noticed that cookies made with browned butter were slightly drier than cookies made with melted butter; some of the water in the butter was evaporating when I browned it. Adding an extra 2 tablespoons of butter and browning most (but not all) of the butter restored the chewy texture to my cookies.
FINAL BAKING TESTS
I tried a range of baking temperatures between 300 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit and found that right down the middle (350 degrees) gave me the most consistent results. I had hoped to bake two sheets at the same time, but even with rotating and changing tray positions at different times during baking, I could not get two-tray baking to work. Some of the cookies had the right texture, but others were inexplicably dry. Baking one tray at a time allows for even heat distribution and ensures that every cookie has the same texture.
My final recipe relies on pantry staples and delivers big brown sugar flavor. And although my technique isn’t difficult (the cookies can be in the oven after just 15 minutes of work), it did require me to learn some chemistry and physics. After baking 1,200 brown sugar cookies, I think I’ve earned advanced degrees in both subjects.
Brown Sugar Cookies
MAKES 24 COOKIES
Use fresh, moist brown sugar for cookies with the best texture.
14 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (10⅔ ounces) all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1¾ cups packed (12¼ ounces) dark brown sugar, plus ¼ cup for rolling
½ teaspoon salt
1 large egg plus 1 large yolk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
¼ cup (1¾ ounces) granulated sugar
1. Melt 10 tablespoons butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Continue to cook, swirling skillet constantly, until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Transfer browned butter to large bowl and stir in remaining 4 tablespoons butter until melted; let cool for 15 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour, baking soda, and baking powder together in bowl.
3. Whisk 1¾ cups brown sugar and salt into cooled browned butter until smooth and no lumps remain, about 30 seconds. Whisk in egg and yolk and vanilla until incorporated, about 30 seconds. Using rubber spatula, stir in flour mixture until just combined, about 1 minute.
4. Combine remaining ¼ cup brown sugar and granulated sugar in shallow dish. Working with 2 tablespoons dough at a time, roll into balls, then roll in sugar to coat; space dough balls 2 inches apart on prepared sheets. (Dough balls can be frozen for up to 1 month; bake frozen dough balls on 1 baking sheet set inside second sheet in 325-degree oven for 20 to 25 minutes.)
5. Bake cookies, 1 sheet at a time, until edges have begun to set but centers are still soft, puffy, and cracked (cookies will look raw between cracks and seem underdone), 12 to 14 minutes, rotating sheet halfway through baking. Let cookies cool on sheet for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack. Let cookies cool completely before serving.
CHECKING DONENESS
Achieving the proper texture—crisp at the edges and chewy in the middle—is critical to this recipe. Because the cookies are so dark, it’s hard to judge doneness by color. Instead, gently press halfway between the edge and center of the cookie. When it’s done, it will form an indent with slight resistance. Check early and err on the side of underdone.
BUILDING BIG BROWN SUGAR FLAVOR
Dark brown sugar was an obvious place to begin our efforts to create a cookie with a bold, nutty, butterscotch flavor. A whole tablespoon of vanilla helped, but everyone in the test kitchen was surprised how much impact browning the butter had on the flavor of these cookies.
DARK BROWN SUGAR
LOTS OF VANILLA
BROWNED BUTTER
GETTING THE COOKIES YOU WANT
Cookie making is simple given the number of key ingredients in a typical recipe, but the slightest alteration can have a major impact. By adjusting any of the key ingredients, you can change the texture of any cookie recipe.
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IF YOU WANT... |
ADD... |
EXPLANATION |
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Chewy cookies |
Melted butter |
Butter is 20 percent water. Melting helps water in butter mix with flour to form gluten. |
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Thin, candy-like cookies |
More sugar |
Sugar becomes fluid in the oven and helps cookies spread. |
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Cakey cookies |
More eggs |
Yolks make cookies rich, and whites cause cookies to puff and dry out. |
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An open, coarse crumb and craggy top |
Baking soda |
Baking soda reacts quickly with acidic ingredients (such as brown sugar) to create lots of gas bubbles. |
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A fine, tight crumb and smooth top |
Baking powder |
Baking powder works slowly and allows for an even rise. |
Being a peanut butter cookie is a lot like being a lady: If you have to announce that you are, you aren’t. I admit to taking liberties with Margaret Thatcher’s famous line (she drew a parallel between being powerful and being a lady), but to a peanut butter obsessive like me, that distinguishing crosshatch on top of a traditional peanut butter cookie feels like a cheat. A cookie shouldn’t have to rely on a homey hieroglyph to proclaim its identity. Great flavor speaks for itself.
Their looks aside, I’ve always had another issue with peanut butter cookies: The raw dough tastes better than the baked treats. This is because in the presence of heat, the starch granules in flour soak up peanut flavor molecules like a sponge, reducing their aroma and limiting their ability to interact with our tastebuds. The upshot is that a traditional peanut butter cookie becomes flavor challenged as soon as it hits the oven. As I mulled over the facts, it occurred to me that a sandwich cookie—that is, two peanut butter cookies enclosing a filling made primarily with uncooked (read: full-flavored) peanut butter—might be the ideal delivery system for the strong flavor that I craved.
The cookies themselves would have to be quite thin and flat (so you could comfortably eat two of them sandwiched with filling) as well as crunchy, to contrast with the creamy center. As for that smooth filling, it had to be substantial enough that it wouldn’t squish out the sides of the cookies with each bite. I also wanted my cookies to have the simplicity of a drop cookie: no chilling of the dough, no slicing, no rolling, and no cutting.
STARTING IN THE MIDDLE
Because a good sandwich cookie is all about balanced flavors and textures, I knew that the filling would influence my cookie and vice versa. I chose to start with the simpler filling. Most recipes call for blending peanut butter and confectioners’ sugar (granulated sugar remains too gritty and doesn’t provide much thickening power) with a creamy element, such as butter, cream cheese, heavy cream, or even marshmallow crème. I settled on butter, which provided the silkiest consistency and allowed for the purest peanut butter flavor. I softened 3 tablespoons of butter with ¾ cup of creamy peanut butter in the microwave and then, to keep the peanut flavor in the forefront, stirred in a modest ½ cup of confectioners’ sugar.
This low-sugar filling tasted great, but it was far too soft, squirting out from my placeholder cookies as soon as I pressed them together. To thicken things up, I ultimately found that I had to double the sugar amount, for a filling that was very sweet. For a perfectly balanced whole, I would have to counter with a significantly less sweet cookie frame.
These cookies boast intense peanut flavor and a perfectly flat, crisp texture thanks to toasted crushed peanuts and extra baking soda.
CRUNCH TIME
Setting the filling aside, I put together a dough with 3 tablespoons of butter, ½ cup of peanut butter, two eggs, 1 cup of sugar, 2 cups of flour, and ½ teaspoon each of baking soda and salt. After portioning the dough and baking it at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes, I had cookies that weren’t bad for a first try, offering just the right degree of sweetness to complement the sugary filling. But they were too thick and soft. I wanted more spread, more crunch, and—if I could pack it in—more peanut flavor.
My first change was to scrap one of the eggs (they contribute protein that traps air and makes baked goods cakey), replacing it with 3 tablespoons of milk. I knew that other factors influence how much cookie dough will spread in the oven: sugar (more sugar equals more spread) and moisture level (more moisture leads to a looser dough that spreads more readily). I’d already established that I couldn’t make the dough any sweeter, so my only option was to increase the moisture level by cutting back on flour. Since my goal was also a super-nutty-tasting cookie, I decided to replace a full cup of flour with finely chopped peanuts, which would absorb far less moisture as well as add welcome crunch and peanut flavor. These changes helped, but the cookies still weren’t spreading enough.
What would happen if I actually took out all of the flour? The idea wasn’t without precedent. Flourless peanut butter cookie recipes abound on the Internet, and I’d always been curious about them. I eliminated the flour and, to my surprise, found that the resulting cookies were not that much thinner or flatter, though they tasted great. They were also far too crumbly. I added flour back incrementally, finding that a ratio of ¾ cup flour to the ½ cup of peanut butter created relatively thin, nutty-tasting cookies that were still sturdy enough to serve as a shell for the filling. Finally, to get them thinner, I relied on brute force: After portioning the dough on the baking sheet, I used my wet hand to squash it into even 2-inch rounds.
I was almost there, but I had one final trick up my sleeve: tinkering with the baking soda. In other cookie recipes, we have found that adding extra soda causes the bubbles within dough to inflate so rapidly that they burst before the cookies set, leaving the cookies flatter than they would be with less soda. A mere ¼ teaspoon of baking soda would be sufficient to leaven the ¾ cup of flour in my recipe; when I quadrupled that amount to a full teaspoon, the cookies quickly puffed up in the oven and then deflated. Voilà: greater spread, just as I had hoped. In addition, these cookies boasted a coarser, more open crumb, which provided extra routes through which moisture could escape. This left the cookies even drier and crunchier—a better foil for the creamy filling.
SPREAD ’EM
With my creamy, peanutty filling and ultra-crunchy cookies ready to go, it was time to put the two components together. But on my first few maddening attempts, the cookies shattered into pieces as I tried to spread the firm filling. I resisted the urge to loosen the filling with more butter, lest it squish out from between the cookies, making the package impossible to eat with any degree of decorum. Then I realized that it was a matter of timing: If I prepared the filling right before assembly, it could be easily scooped and squished between the cookies while it was still warm from the microwave—no painstaking spreading necessary—after which it would cool and set to an ideal firm texture.
At last, I had a cookie with a simple, understated appearance that delivered the powerful peanut wallop promised (but rarely provided) by those pretenders sporting the traditional fork marks.
Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
MAKES 24 COOKIES
Do not use unsalted peanut butter for this recipe.
Cookies
1¼ cups (6¼ ounces) raw peanuts, toasted and cooled
¾ cup (3¾ ounces) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
½ cup creamy peanut butter
½ cup (3½ ounces) granulated sugar
½ cup packed (3½ ounces) light brown sugar
3 tablespoons whole milk
1 large egg
¾ cup creamy peanut butter
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup (4 ounces) confectioners’ sugar
1. For the cookies: Adjust oven racks to upper-middle and lower-middle positions and heat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Pulse peanuts in food processor until finely chopped, about 8 pulses. Whisk flour, baking soda, and salt together in bowl. Whisk melted butter, peanut butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, milk, and egg together in second bowl. Stir flour mixture into peanut butter mixture with rubber spatula until combined. Stir in peanuts until evenly distributed.
2. Using 1-tablespoon measure or #60 scoop, evenly space 12 mounds on each prepared baking sheet. Using your damp hand, flatten mounds until 2 inches in diameter.
3. Bake until deep golden brown and firm to touch, 15 to 18 minutes, switching and rotating sheets halfway through baking. Let cookies cool on sheets for 5 minutes. Transfer cookies to wire rack and let cool completely, about 30 minutes. Repeat portioning and baking remaining dough.
4. For the filling: Microwave peanut butter and butter until butter is melted and warm, about 40 seconds. Using rubber spatula, stir in confectioners’ sugar until combined.
5. To assemble: Place 24 cookies upside down on work surface. Place 1 level tablespoon (or #60 scoop) warm filling in center of each cookie. Place second cookie on top of filling, right side up, pressing gently until filling spreads to edges. Allow filling to set for 1 hour before serving. (Assembled cookies can be stored in airtight container for up to 3 days.)
variations
Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies with Honey-Cinnamon Filling
Omit butter from filling. Stir 5 tablespoons honey and ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon into warm peanut butter before adding confectioners’ sugar.
Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies with Milk Chocolate Filling
Reduce peanut butter to ½ cup and omit butter from filling. Stir 6 ounces finely chopped milk chocolate into warm peanut butter until melted, microwaving for 10 seconds at a time if necessary, before adding confectioners’ sugar.
FILLING COOKIES EVENLY
One of our goals for our Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies was to get a filling that would spread evenly but not ooze out the sides. Here’s how we did it.
SCOOP IT WARM Using a #60 scoop or a 1-tablespoon measure, portion warm filling onto the bottom cookies (turned upside down).
SQUISH IT GENTLY Rather than smearing the filling with a knife or offset spatula, top it with a second cookie and press gently until it spreads to the edges.
Baking cookies has become a holiday tradition—as has the disposal of those with so little appeal that they go uneaten, even during a season of unabashed overindulgence. In my house, after the fruitcake, the first cookies to bite the dust are the balls and crescents coated in a pasty layer of melting confectioners’ sugar. I have come to expect these cookies to be no more than stale, dry, floury, flavorless little chokeballs. They always fall short of the buttery, nutty, slightly crisp, slightly crumbly, melt-in-your-mouth nuggets they should be.
But that is a shame. Nut crescents are very much an “adult” cookie, low on sweetness, simple in flavor, and the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee or tea. When they are well-made, they are delicious, and I wanted to devise a recipe that would yield cookies that are eagerly awaited every holiday season, much like my mother’s sugar cookies.
Superfine sugar and a combination of finely chopped and ground nuts yield tender, delicate, nutty cookies.
I gathered recipe after recipe from large, authoritative books and small, pamphletsized publications. These cookies, round and crescent-shaped, go by different names: Viennese crescents, butterballs, and Mexican wedding cakes, as well as almond, pecan, or walnut crescents. All the recipes are surprisingly similar, differing mainly in the amount and type of sugar and nuts. The standard ratio of butter to flour is 1 cup to 2 cups, with the flour in a few instances going as low as 1¾ cup and as high as 2½ cups. Across the board, the ingredients are simple: flour, sugar, butter, and nuts. Some add vanilla extract and salt. I chose four recipes and, with the input of a few tasters, formed a composite recipe to serve as the springboard for my testing.
FLOUR AND SWEETNESS
Flour was my starting point. I certainly didn’t need to go very far. Cookies made with 2 cups of all-purpose flour to 1 cup of butter were right on. The dough was easy to shape and handle, and the baked cookies were tender, delicate, and shapely. Any less flour and the rich cookies spread and lost some form in the oven; any more and they were dry and floury. I tried cake flour and cornstarch in place of some flour, thinking that one or another would provide extra tenderness. Both were failures. The resulting cookies lacked body and structure and disintegrated unpleasantly in the mouth.
Next I zeroed in on sugar. I liked the sweetness of the cookies I had been making, but needed to discover the effects of granulated, confectioners’, and superfine sugar. Granulated sugar yielded a cookie that was tasty, but coarse in both texture and appearance. Cookies made with confectioners’ sugar were very tender, light, and fine-textured. Superfine, however, proved superior, producing cookies that were delicate, lightly crisp, and superbly tender, with a true melt-in-your-mouth quality. In a side-by-side tasting, the cookies made with superfine sugar were nuttier and purer in flavor, while the cornstarch in the confectioners’ sugar bogged down the flavor and left a faint pastiness in the mouth.
As I tinkered with the amount of sugar, I had to keep in mind that these cookies are coated in confectioners’ sugar after they are baked. One-third of a cup gives them a mildly sweet edge when they’re eaten plain, but it’s the roll in confectioners’ sugar that gives them their finished look and just the right amount of extra sweetness.
When to give the baked cookies their coat of confectioners’ sugar is a matter of some debate. Some recipes said to dust or dip them when they’re still hot or warm. The sugar melts a bit, and then they’re usually given a second coat to even out their appearance and form a thicker coating. But I didn’t like the layer of melting moistened confectioners’ sugar, concealed or not. It formed a thin skin that was pasty and gummy and didn’t dissolve on the tongue with the same finesse as a fine, powdery coat. I found it better to wait until the cookies had cooled to room temperature before coating them with confectioners’ sugar.
Sifting sugar over the cooled cookies was tedious, and I wasn’t able to achieve a heavy enough coating on the tops—or any at all on the bottoms. What worked much better was simply rolling them in confectioners’ sugar. One coat resulted in a rather thin layer that was a bit spotty, but a second roll covered any blemishes, giving them an attractive, thick, powdery white coating.
If not served immediately, the cookies may lose a little in looks due to handling and storage. This problem can be easily solved by reserving the second coat of confectioners’ sugar until just before serving.
NUT CASE
During the nut testing, I concluded that what affected the cookies most was not the taste of the nuts but whether they were oily or dry. I found that when they were ground, the two types of nuts affected the cookies in different ways.
The flavor of oily nuts like walnuts and pecans is strong and distinct. These nuts are easier to chop and grind and, when finely ground, become quite oily. This is a definite advantage when making nut crescents, because the dough becomes softer and the resulting cookies are incredibly tender and delicate. Dry nuts like almonds and hazelnuts are rather subdued by comparison. Toasting brings out their maximum flavor and crunchiness. Although these nuts are somewhat difficult to chop, that is the best form to use them in. Ground dry nuts did very little, if anything at all, to the texture of the cookies. Don’t get me wrong: The almond and hazelnut cookies are delicious—they just don’t melt in your mouth with the same abandon as the pecan and walnut ones.
In a recipe using 1 cup of butter and 2 cups of flour, various bakers called for anywhere from ½ cup to a hefty 2 cups of nuts, either roughly chopped, finely chopped, or ground. I wanted to cram as much nut flavor as I could into these cookies, but I found that 2 cups of ground nuts made them a tad greasy, while 1½ cups didn’t give as much flavor as I was hoping for, so 1¾ cups was a happy compromise.
Chopped nuts were too coarse for the fine texture of the crescents and were quickly dismissed. Ground nuts, on the other hand, warranted further investigation. Oily ground nuts were flavorful, and because grinding really brought out the oils, they actually tenderized the cookies. I thought, though, that using a combination of ground and finely chopped nuts might tenderize, be flavorful, and add a pleasant bite. Hands down, a combo of 1 cup of finely chopped and ¾ cup of ground nuts was the tasters’ choice.
I had, up to this point, baked over 30 batches of cookies. I pressed on, however, knowing that I was very close.
TAKING SHAPE
Recipes suggested baking temperatures ranging from a ridiculously low 300 degrees to a hot 400. At 375 degrees, the cookies browned too quickly, while at 300, they never achieved a nice golden hue, even after nearly half an hour of baking. Clearly the answer lay somewhere in between. My cookie-baking experience told me that many delicate, rich doughs like to bake at lower temperatures, and these cookies were no exception. Cookies baked at 350 degrees were good, but those baked at 325 degrees had a smoother, finer appearance, and were more tender and evenly textured and colored.
Whether you give them as gifts or keep them, these are cookies for eating, and not for the trash. The fruitcake may be a little lonely from now on.
Pecan or Walnut Crescent Cookies
MAKES ABOUT 48 COOKIES
If you can’t find superfine sugar, process granulated sugar in a food processor for 30 seconds.
2 cups (10 ounces) all-purpose flour
2 cups (8 ounces) pecans or walnuts, chopped fine
½ teaspoon salt
16 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
⅓ cup (2½ ounces) superfine sugar
1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
1½ cups (6 ounces) confectioners’ sugar
1. Adjust oven racks to upper-middle and lower-middle positions and heat oven to 325 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. Whisk flour, 1 cup pecans, and salt together in medium bowl; set aside. Process remaining 1 cup pecans in food processor until they are texture of coarse cornmeal, 10 to 15 seconds (do not overprocess). Stir pecans into flour mixture and set aside.
3. Using stand mixer fitted with paddle, beat butter and superfine sugar at medium-low speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes; add vanilla, scraping down bowl as needed. Add flour mixture and beat on low speed until dough just begins to come together but still looks scrappy, about 15 seconds. Scrape down bowl as needed; continue beating until dough is cohesive, 6 to 9 seconds longer. Do not overbeat.
4. Working with 1 tablespoon dough at a time, roll into balls. Roll each ball of dough between your palms into rope that measures 3 inches long. Place ropes on prepared baking sheets and turn up ends to form crescent shape. Bake until tops of cookies are pale golden and bottoms are just beginning to brown, 17 to 19 minutes, switching and rotating baking sheets halfway through baking.
5. Let cookies cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; transfer cookies to wire rack and let cool completely. Place confectioners’ sugar in shallow baking dish. Working with 3 or 4 cookies at a time, roll cookies in sugar to coat thoroughly; gently shake off excess. (Cookies can be stored in airtight container for up to 5 days.) Before serving, roll cookies in confectioners’ sugar again to ensure thick coating and tap off excess.
variation
Almond or Hazelnut Crescent Cookies
Almonds can be used raw, for cookies that are light in both color and flavor, or toasted, to enhance the almond flavor and darken the crescents.
Substitute 1¾ cups whole blanched almonds (toasted, if desired) or 2 cups skinned toasted hazelnuts for pecans or walnuts. If using almonds, add ½ teaspoon almond extract along with vanilla extract.
SHAPING THE COOKIES
1. Roll dough balls between your palms to form 3-inch-long ropes.
2. Place ropes on prepared baking sheets and turn up ends to form crescent shapes.
If your experience with shortbread is limited to bland, chalky specimens from tins, you might wonder how this plain-looking bar (which dates back to at least 12th-century Scotland) came to be one of the British Isles’ most famous tea cakes. But when shortbread is made well, it’s easy to understand why it earned a reputation as a favorite of high-ranking palates from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Elizabeth II. The best versions are an alluring tawny brown with a pure, buttery richness. Shortbread’s distinctive sandy texture distinguishes it from the simple crispness of its cousin, the American butter cookie, while its moderate sweetness makes it easy to go back for seconds.
Shortbread originated as a way to turn leftover oat bread into something more special: The scraps were sprinkled with sugar and left to harden overnight in an oven still hot from the day’s baking. By the 16th century, wheat flour had replaced oat bread in the recipe, and this biscuit morphed from a foodstuff of commoners into the more refined confection prized by nobility.
For shortbread with an ultrafine, sandy texture, we add some ground oats and let the cookies finish baking in a turned-off oven.
The basics haven’t changed much over the past five centuries: Combine flour, sugar, butter, and salt and then pat the dough into a round and bake. But the recipes I unearthed varied in their proportions. Some called for equal parts butter and flour, and some for 1 part butter to 1 parts flour; several included unlikely ingredients like rice flour or cornstarch. Results were also all over the map. While some cookies fell apart in my hand, others were sturdy and crispy to a fault, and still others turned out either greasy or overly airy and cake-like. Moreover, nearly every version suffered from some degree of uneven cooking and overbrowning.
IN THE MIX
To get my bearings, I decided to limit my ingredients to the basic four before tinkering with extras. As for proportions, I ruled out a 1:1 ratio of butter to flour after preliminary tests proved that this was too greasy. I settled on a more moderate 1:2 ratio, with two sticks of butter, 2 cups of all-purpose flour, ⅔ cup of sugar, and ¼ teaspoon of salt.
As for mixing method, I would need to test the most traditional approach, which is akin to making pie crust: Cut the butter and dry ingredients together until they form wet crumbs and then pack the crumbs together into a dough. I also made two batches using more modern methods. For one, I creamed the butter and sugar in a stand mixer before adding the flour; for the other, I employed reverse creaming, mixing the flour and sugar before adding the butter.
Next, I formed cookies from my three doughs. Shortbread traditionally takes one of three shapes: individual round cookies; rectangular “fingers”; or one large circle with a hole cut in the center and then scored into wedges, called “petticoat tails” because the uncut cookie resembles a dressmaker’s pattern. Pursuing the petticoat shape (for no reason except that it was reportedly the shape favored by Mary, Queen of Scots), I pressed the dough into a 9-inch disk, used a biscuit cutter to remove a hole from the center, and placed the shortbread in a 450-degree oven for a few minutes. Following the usual high-low baking protocol called for in shortbread recipes, I then reduced the oven to 300 degrees and continued to bake the cookies for an hour before scoring and cooling them.
I evaluated the results. The traditional, packed-crumb method produced cookies that were crumbly in some spots and brittle in others. Regular creaming incorporated too much air into the dough, making for soft, airy, cake-like cookies. Reverse creaming, which creates less aeration, yielded the most reliable results and was clearly the way to go. Tweaking the recipe, I reduced the butter, from 16 to 14 tablespoons, which resulted in a dough that was pliable and had plenty of buttery flavor but did not exude grease during baking. I also traded the white sugar for confectioners’ sugar to smooth out an objectionable granular texture. Although my basic ingredients and mixing technique now seemed to be in order, the shortbread cookies were somewhat tough, and they were not as crisp as I wanted.
TOUGH COOKIE
Two factors played into my texture problem: gluten and moisture. Gluten, the protein matrix that lends baked goods structure and chew, forms naturally when liquid and all-purpose flour are combined, even with minimal kneading. The liquid in my recipe was coming from the butter, which contains 20 percent water—just enough to make my cookies tough. In addition, cookies can become truly crisp and crumbly only if they are perfectly dry. My goals, then, were to limit gluten development and to help the cookies dry out completely.
I first tried baking a batch entirely at 450 degrees, hoping the higher temperature would drive moisture from the cookies, but the edges started overbrowning after just 10 minutes, while the inner portion remained wet. I tried again, baking a second batch at 450 degrees for 5 minutes (to help set the dough) and then lowering the temperature to 250 degrees. This was better but still not perfect.
Early shortbread was made by leaving the dough in a still-warm oven heated only by dying embers. What if I briefly baked the shortbread, shut off the oven, and left it inside until it was completely dry? With just 15 minutes or so of “real” baking in a hot oven—and an hour with the oven turned off—the results were striking: This batch was dry through and through, with an even, golden-brown exterior.
With the moisture issue resolved, I shifted my focus to the toughness caused by excess gluten development. Various 21st-century recipes have tried to solve this problem by substituting low-protein, gluten-free rice flour for some of the all-purpose flour. I gave it a try. The rice-flour shortbread’s crumbly texture looked promising, but when I took a bite, I realized that reducing the all-purpose flour had also made the cookies woefully bland. Cornstarch (another gluten-free ingredient used in some modern recipes) yielded equally insipid results.
Scanning the test kitchen’s shelves, I spotted a possible solution: old-fashioned oats. Oats have a nice nutty flavor and contain few of the proteins necessary for gluten development; on top of that, they’re traditional to early shortbread recipes. I ground some oats to a powder in a spice grinder and substituted ¾ cup of this oat flour for some of the all-purpose flour in my recipe. The resulting cookies had a promising crisp and crumbly texture, but the oats muted the buttery flavor. Still, I knew that I was on the right track. For my next batch, I used less oat flour and supplemented it with a modest amount of cornstarch. This worked handsomely. The cookies were now perfectly crispy, with an appealing hint of oat flavor.
SO LONG, SPREADING
I had one last problem to solve: spreading. As buttery shortbread bakes, it expands, losing its shape as the edges flatten out. I tried baking the dough in a traditional shortbread mold with ½-inch-high sides, but it still widened into an amorphous mass. Clearly, the dough needed a substantial barrier to keep its edges corralled. My solution? A springform pan collar. I set the closed collar on a parchment-lined baking sheet, patted the dough into it, and then opened the collar to give the cookie about half an inch to spread out.
With my baking method perfected, I put together a gussied-up variation, dipping a pistachio-studded version in melted chocolate. History had repeated itself, and I now had some of the finest shortbread of its time.
MAKES 16 WEDGES
Use the collar of a springform pan to form the shortbread into an even round. Mold the shortbread with the collar in the closed position, then open the collar, but leave it in place. This allows the shortbread to expand slightly but keeps it from spreading too far. The extracted round of dough in step 2 is baked alongside the rest of the shortbread.
½ cup (1½ ounces) old-fashioned rolled oats
1½ cups (7½ ounces) all-purpose flour
⅔ cup (2⅔ ounces) confectioners’ sugar
¼ cup (1 ounce) cornstarch
½ teaspoon salt
14 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into ⅛-inch-thick slices and chilled
1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 450 degrees. Pulse oats in spice grinder or blender until reduced to fine powder, about 10 pulses (you should have ¼ to ⅓ cup oat flour). Using stand mixer fitted with paddle, mix oat flour, all-purpose flour, sugar, cornstarch, and salt on low speed until combined, about 5 seconds. Add butter to dry ingredients and continue to mix until dough just forms and pulls away from sides of bowl, 5 to 10 minutes.
2. Line baking sheet with parchment paper. Place upside-down (grooved edge should beat top) collar of 9- or 9½-inch springform pan on prepared sheet (do not use springform pan bottom). Press dough into collar in even ½-inch-thick layer, smoothing top of dough with back of spoon. Place 2-inch biscuit cutter in center of dough and cut out center. Place extracted round alongside springform collar on sheet and replace cutter in center of dough. Open springform collar, but leave it in place.
3. Bake shortbread for 5 minutes, then reduce oven temperature to 250 degrees. Continue to bake until edges turn pale golden, 10 to 15 minutes longer. Remove sheet from oven; turn off oven. Remove springform pan collar; use chef’s knife to score surface of shortbread into 16 even wedges, cutting halfway through shortbread. Using wooden skewer, poke 8 to 10 holes in each wedge. Return shortbread to oven and prop door open with handle of wooden spoon, leaving 1-inch gap at top. Let shortbread dry in turned-off oven until pale golden in center (shortbread should be firm but giving to touch), about 1 hour.
4. Transfer sheet to wire rack; let shortbread cool completely. Cut shortbread at scored marks to separate and serve. (Shortbread can be wrapped tightly in plastic wrap and stored at room temperature for up to 1 week.)
variations
Chocolate-Dipped Pistachio Shortbread
Add ½ cup finely chopped toasted pistachios to dry ingredients in step 1. Bake and cool shortbread as directed. Once shortbread is cool, melt 8 ounces finely chopped bittersweet chocolate in small heatproof bowl set over saucepan filled with 1 inch of barely simmering water, making sure that water does not touch bottom of bowl and stirring occasionally until smooth. Off heat; stir in additional 2 ounces finely chopped bittersweet chocolate until smooth. Carefully dip base of each wedge in chocolate, allowing chocolate to come halfway up cookie. Scrape off excess with finger and place on parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet. Refrigerate until chocolate sets, about 15 minutes.
Turbinado sugar is commonly sold as Sugar in the Raw. Demerara sugar, sanding sugar, or another coarse sugar can be substituted.
Add ½ cup chopped crystallized ginger to dry ingredients in step 1. Sprinkle shortbread with 1 tablespoon turbinado sugar after poking holes in shortbread in step 3.
To toast the oats, heat them in an 8-inch skillet over medium-high heat until light golden brown, 5 to 8 minutes.
Add ½ cup toasted oats to dry ingredients in step 1. Sprinkle ½ teaspoon sea salt evenly over surface of dough before baking.
ANDREW JANJIGIAN, November/December 2017
Are roll-and-cut sugar cookies a fun, festive project? Not in my kitchen: They’ve always been a maddening chore with nothing but floury, shapeless disappointments to show for the effort. Most recipes require you to haul out a stand mixer to cream sugar and softened butter before mixing in the remaining ingredients and then to refrigerate the dough before rolling, cutting, and baking. The lump of dough is always stiff after chilling, so it’s challenging to roll. Many of the cookies puff during baking, which leaves them uneven or with indistinct outlines. What’s more, they’re often hard and dense rather than simply sturdy.
I wanted to turn things around with a dough that would be easy—maybe even fun—to work with. It would be firm enough to shape with cookie cutters and to carry frosting and other decorations after baking. The cookies would bake up crisp and flat, with sharp edges, and they would have a satisfying, buttery flavor.
THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES
I began with a recipe that had decent flavor. It called for beating two sticks of softened butter with 1 cup of sugar; mixing in 2½ cups of flour, an egg, salt, and vanilla; and then chilling the dough before rolling, cutting, and baking. The cookies were buttery and just sweet enough, but they had a slightly granular texture and tended to puff in the oven, leaving them bumpy and uneven.
Graininess can come from an excess of sugar, but reducing the sugar by ⅓ cup upset the flavor. Instead, I tried replacing the granulated sugar with confectioners’ sugar, but this turned the cookies somewhat chalky and hard rather than crisp. However, superfine sugar (granulated sugar that has been ground to a fine—but not powdery—consistency) was just the ticket: fine enough to smooth out any graininess but coarse enough to maintain a slightly open crumb. And happily, superfine sugar is a cinch to make by pulverizing granulated sugar in a food processor.
To address the cookies’ puffiness, I examined the creaming step, the goal of which is to incorporate air. It makes sense for a soft, cakey cookie, but was it detrimental to one that I wanted to be flat and even? For my next batch, I briefly mixed the sugar and butter until just combined. Sure enough, these cookies baked up entirely flat.
But they were now a little dense, begging for a tiny amount of air. I turned to baking soda and baking powder; ¼ teaspoon of each produced flat cookies with a crisp yet sturdy texture.
Combining superfine sugar and cold butter in the food processor makes this dough easy to work with.
ROLLING IN DOUGH
Now it was time to address my other issue with roll-and-cut cookies—the need to chill the dough before rolling it, which inevitably leads to strong-arming a cold, hardened lump into submission. Refrigerating the dough for a shorter time wasn’t an option, since it wouldn’t have time to chill evenly. And rolling the dough straightaway was out of the question because I was using softened butter—a must for easy combining in a stand mixer—which produced a soft dough that would cling to a rolling pin. I needed a dough made with cold butter.
That meant I would need to “plasticize” the butter, or soften it while keeping it cold, so that my dough would roll out without ripping or sticking. Croissant bakers plasticize blocks of butter by pounding them with a rolling pin. I didn’t want to beat butter by hand, but I could use the food processor. Unlike the paddle of a stand mixer, which would struggle to soften cold butter quickly, the fast, ultrasharp blades of a food processor could turn it malleable.
I processed the sugar and then added chunks of cold butter and combined them into a smooth paste. I whizzed in the egg and vanilla, plus a smidge of almond extract for an unidentifiable flavor boost, and then added the dry ingredients. The dough was pliable but not soft or sticky.
I halved the dough and placed each portion between sheets of parchment paper to help prevent sticking. It rolled out like a dream. To ensure easy cutting and clean, well-defined edges, I still needed to chill the dough, so I placed it in the refrigerator for 1½ hours. By eliminating the need to bring the butter to room temperature, skipping creaming, and making the dough easy to roll, I’d shaved off some time—and plenty of effort—from the recipe.
I’d been baking the cookies at 350 degrees on the middle rack, but the edges of the cookies around the perimeter of the sheet were dark brown by the time the center ones were golden. The fix was three-pronged. One: I reduced the oven temperature to 300 degrees; more-gradual baking evened the color. Two: I lowered the oven rack, so the cookies baked from the bottom up. This meant that they browned nicely on their undersides (for hidden flavor) while remaining lighter on top. Three: I used a rimless cookie sheet instead of a rimmed baking sheet. This promoted air circulation, so the cookies baked more evenly.
A ROYAL FINISH
For decoration, I decided to use royal icing, which tasted good and firmed up nicely. Named for its use on Queen Victoria’s cake at her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840, this mix of whipped egg whites and sugar sets into a dry coating with a matte surface. I added vanilla and salt to my version. Piped or poured onto the cooled cookies, it was a joyful finish to the best—and easiest—cut-out cookies I’d ever made.
Easy Holiday Sugar Cookies
MAKES ABOUT FORTY 2½-INCH COOKIES
For the dough to have the proper consistency when rolling, make sure to use cold butter directly from the refrigerator. In step 3, use a rolling pin and a combination of rolling and a pushing or smearing motion to form the soft dough into an oval. A rimless cookie sheet helps achieve evenly baked cookies; if you don’t have one, use an overturned rimmed baking sheet. Dough scraps can be combined and rerolled once, though the cookies will be slightly less tender. If desired, stir one or two drops of food coloring into the icing. For a pourable icing, whisk in milk, 1 teaspoon at a time, until the desired consistency is reached. You can also decorate the shapes with sanding sugar or sprinkles before baking.
Cookies
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¾ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon almond extract
2½ cups (12½ ounces) all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup (7 ounces) granulated sugar
16 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch pieces and chilled
2⅔ cups (10⅔ ounces) confectioners’ sugar
2 large egg whites
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
⅛ teaspoon salt
1. For the cookies: Whisk egg, vanilla, salt, and almond extract together in small bowl. Whisk flour, baking powder, and baking soda together in second bowl.
2. Process sugar in food processor until finely ground, about 30 seconds. Add butter and process until uniform mass forms and no large pieces of butter are visible, about 30 seconds, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Add egg mixture and process until smooth and paste-like, about 10 seconds. Add flour mixture and process until no dry flour remains but mixture remains crumbly, about 30 seconds, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.
3. Turn out dough onto counter and knead gently by hand until smooth, about 10 seconds. Divide dough in half. Place 1 piece of dough in center of large sheet of parchment paper and press into 7 by 9-inch oval. Place second large sheet of parchment over dough and roll dough into 10 by 14-inch oval of even ⅛-inch thickness. Transfer dough with parchment to rimmed baking sheet. Repeat pressing and rolling with second piece of dough, then stack on top of first piece on sheet. Refrigerate until dough is firm, at least 1½ hours (or freeze for 30 minutes). (Rolled dough can be wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated for up to 5 days.)
4. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 300 degrees. Line rimless cookie sheet with parchment. Working with 1 piece of rolled dough, gently peel off top layer of parchment. Replace parchment, loosely covering dough. (Peeling off parchment and returning it will make cutting and removing cookies easier.) Turn over dough and parchment and gently peel off and discard second piece of parchment. Using cookie cutter, cut dough into shapes. Transfer shapes to prepared cookie sheet, spacing them about ½ inch apart. Bake until cookies are lightly and evenly browned around edges, 14 to 17 minutes, rotating sheet halfway through baking. Let cookies cool on sheet for 5 minutes. Using wide metal spatula, transfer cookies to wire rack and let cool completely. Repeat cutting and baking with remaining dough. (Dough scraps can be patted together, rerolled, and chilled once before cutting and baking.)
5. For the royal icing: Using stand mixer fitted with whisk attachment, whip all ingredients on medium-low speed until combined, about 1 minute. Increase speed to medium-high and whip until glossy, soft peaks form, 3 to 4 minutes, scraping down bowl as needed.
6. Spread icing onto cooled cookies. Let icing dry completely, about 1½ hours, before serving.
LOOSEN PARCHMENT SO COOKIES DON’T STICK
After chilling the rolled-out dough between sheets of parchment paper, we peel back and replace the top sheet of parchment before flipping the dough over. The loosened parchment won’t stick to the undersides of the cut-out cookie shapes when we transfer them to a baking sheet.
REVAMPING SUGAR COOKIES
A number of updates to the usual approach resulted in better, easier cookies.
COLD BUTTER instead of softened butter means dough is firm enough to be rolled immediately after mixing.
SUPERFINE SUGAR made by processing granulated sugar in food processor smooths out graininess but still allows for open crumb.
SHARP BLADES OF FOOD PROCESSOR rapidly whiz cold ingredients into malleable dough.
ROLL, THEN CHILL method eliminates need to battle cold, hard lump of dough into thin sheet.
Confession: I consider myself a from-scratch, hands-on, all-natural kind of cook, but I love a good box-mix brownie. It was a dicey admission to make to my colleagues, all serious cooks themselves, as we discussed the brownies we crave most. Then one ally voiced her support, and another followed. Pretty soon, any previous high-minded idea of what makes a brownie truly irresistible had been eclipsed by the collective memory of versions from a cardboard box.
True, nobody was gushing over their chemical sweetness—everyone agreed that box-mix brownies are all about texture. My goal was clear: a homemade brownie with the chewiness (and the shiny, crisp, crackly top) to rival box-mix versions—but flush with a rich, deep, chocolate flavor.
BROWNIE POINTS
To start, I rounded up as many brownie recipes as I could find with “chewy” in the title, but not one of the recipes could actually lay claim to such a quality. The issue was that all brownie recipes, regardless of texture, are composed of the same basic ingredients: fat (usually butter), eggs, salt, sugar, vanilla, flour (typically all-purpose), and, of course, chocolate (most often from an unsweetened bar). Producing a fudgy brownie or a cakey one boils down to manipulating the ratio of fat and chocolate to flour. But the ratios called for in the “chewy” brownie recipes I consulted (on average, about 4 ounces of chocolate, 8 ounces of butter, and 5 ounces of flour) tended to produce brownies that were merely soft, not chewy. Their mixing techniques, another possible way to introduce chewiness, weren’t helping either: While a few called for creaming the butter and sugar, most simply required melting the chocolate and butter; stirring in the sugar, eggs, and vanilla; and folding in the flour.
I resumed my recipe hunt, keeping an eye out for any unusual techniques or ingredients. I tried one that called for cooking the sugar and butter into a caramel, which I folded into the other ingredients, but these lacked chewiness. I tried baking brownies on a pizza stone (the theory being that the burst of bottom heat would melt the sugars, imparting chew) as well as underbaking brownies and then chilling them in an ice bath. Alas, the pizza-stone brownie turned out as soft as previous attempts, and the underbaked specimen was…underbaked.
For better-than-box-mix brownies, we use both butter and vegetable oil for the best texture, and three kinds of chocolate for intense flavor.
Clearly, to create a brownie with a truly chewy texture, I was on my own. Taking a break from baking, I tried to think of other baked goods that are heavy on chew. Brown sugar cookies came to mind. Because brown sugar and corn syrup are both hygroscopic (i.e., they attract and retain water), cookie dough containing high levels of these ingredients bakes up moister and chewier than the exact same cookie dough made with white sugar, which is less hygroscopic.
So, I took one of the chewier brownie recipes I found, which called for 4 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, two sticks of butter, 1 cup of flour, two eggs, and 2 cups of sugar, and replaced the white sugar with a combination of brown sugar and corn syrup. Not only did it do nothing for texture, it also managed to lose the shiny, crackly crust; in its place emerged a dull, matte, cake-like finish. Regular sugar would have to stay.
I consulted our science editor to see if he knew of any tricks that box-mix brownies use to achieve their chewiness. His answer completely changed the direction of my research: “high-tech shortening system.”
BEAT THE SYSTEM
It turns out that the whole key to the texture of a box-mix brownie resides in the types and amounts of fat it includes, and manufacturers have spent years coming up with the right formulation.
Fat can be divided into two broad types—saturated and unsaturated. Predominantly saturated fats such as shortening and lard are solid even at room temperature. Unsaturated fats, such as vegetable oils, are liquid at room temperature. The right combination—the shortening system—is what gives box-mix brownies their unique texture.
Brownie mixes come with the saturated-fat component, which is broken down into tiny, powdery crystals. When a cook adds unsaturated vegetable oil to this mix, the liquid fat and powdered solid fat combine in a ratio designed to deliver maximum chew. To get the same chew at home, I would have to discover the perfect proportion of liquid to solid fat without the aid of the high-tech fats used by brownie-mix manufacturers.
REACHING A SATURATION POINT
I started by identifying all the sources of fat in my recipe: butter, melted chocolate, and egg yolks. I’d keep the butter as my saturated fat—it would be a more flavorful choice than vegetable shortening. To simplify my calculations, I eliminated the melted chocolate and used cocoa powder, which contains very little fat by comparison. Once I figured out the ideal fat ratios, I’d put the bar chocolate back in. For an unsaturated fat, I stuck to vegetable oil.
Next I devised a series of recipes that all had roughly the same amount of total fat, but with varying ratios of butter to vegetable oil. I found that brownies that contained mostly saturated fat baked up quite tender and not at all chewy, while brownies made with mostly unsaturated fat were the chewier ones. Finally, after extensive trial and error, I hit on the magic formula to produce the chewiest brownie: 29 percent saturated fat to 71 percent unsaturated—or about a 1:3 ratio. The box-mix numbers virtually mirrored my results, with 28 percent saturated fat to 72 percent unsaturated.
But problems persisted: While chewy, my brownies were greasy, and with cocoa powder as the sole source of chocolate, their flavor was predictably lackluster.
GREASE, BE GONE
I attacked the greasiness first. Emulsifiers can help prevent fats from separating and leaking out during baking. I thought back to the test kitchen’s recipe for vinaigrette, in which we found that mayonnaise—an emulsion itself—was able to keep the dressing from separating because of its emulsifiers. Delving deeper, I identified the active emulsifier in the mayonnaise as lecithin, a phospholipid that occurs naturally in egg yolks. The addition of two extra yolks to my recipe in exchange for a little oil made greasiness a thing of the past.
Now for chocolate flavor. Loath to tamper with my fine-tuned fat ratio, I first tried tweaks that wouldn’t affect the fats. Espresso powder deepens chocolate flavor without imparting a strong coffee taste. Stirring 1½ teaspoons into the boiling water along with the cocoa helped, but I knew I could do better.
Research revealed that although the total fat in unsweetened chocolate is lower per ounce than in an equivalent amount of butter, it contains a similar ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat. By replacing 2 tablespoons of butter (or 1 ounce) with 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, I could stay very close to the ideal fat ratio.
Finally, to pack in still more chocolate flavor, I incorporated a full 6 ounces of bittersweet chocolate chunks—since they didn’t melt until the batter started baking, they didn’t affect the texture. The result: chewy, fudgy bars with gooey pockets of melted chocolate, no industrial processing needed.
Chewy Brownies
MAKES 24 BROWNIES
For the chewiest texture, it is important to let the brownies cool thoroughly before cutting. If your baking dish is glass, cool the brownies for 10 minutes, then remove them promptly from the pan (otherwise, the superior heat retention of glass can lead to overbaking).
⅓ cup (1 ounce) Dutch-processed cocoa
1½ teaspoons instant espresso powder (optional)
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons boiling water
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped fine
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 large eggs plus 2 large yolks
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2½ cups (17½ ounces) sugar
1¾ cups (8¾ ounces) all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon salt
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, cut into ½-inch pieces
1. Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Make foil sling for 13 by 9-inch baking pan by folding 2 long sheets of aluminum foil; first sheet should be 13 inches wide, and second sheet should be 9 inches wide. Lay sheets of foil in pan perpendicular to each other, with extra foil hanging over edges of pan. Push foil into corners and up sides of pan, smoothing foil flush to pan, and grease foil.
2. Whisk cocoa, espresso powder, if using, and boiling water together in large bowl until smooth. Add unsweetened chocolate and whisk until chocolate is melted. Whisk in oil and melted butter. (Mixture may look curdled.) Whisk in eggs, yolks, and vanilla until smooth and homogeneous. Whisk in sugar until fully incorporated. Add flour and salt and mix with rubber spatula until combined. Fold in chocolate pieces.
3. Scrape batter into prepared pan and smooth top. Bake brownies until toothpick inserted halfway between edge and center comes out with few moist crumbs attached, 30 to 35 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking. Let brownies cool in pan for 1½ hours.
4. Using foil overhang, lift brownies from pan. Transfer to wire rack and let cool completely, about 1 hour. Cut into 24 squares and serve.
BAKING BROWNIES WITH A SHINY, CRACKLY TOP
A glossy, crackly top is one of the hallmarks of a great brownie, but achieving it can be elusive. Can the type of sweetener you use help?
THE EXPERIMENT We baked three batches of brownies, one sweetened with granulated sugar, another with brown sugar, and a third with brown sugar and corn syrup.
THE RESULTS Only the brownies made with granulated sugar took on an attractive crackly sheen. The other batches had a dull, matte finish.
THE EXPLANATION Why does granulated sugar work best? It’s all due to what might be deemed “special effects.” Whether on its own or in combination with corn syrup, brown sugar forms crystals on the surface of the cooling brownie. Crystals reflect light in a diffuse way, creating a matte effect. The pure sucrose in granulated sugar, on the other hand, forms a smooth, glass-like surface as it cools that reflects light in a focused way, for a shiny effect. As for the crackly crust, its formation depends on sugar molecules rising to the surface of the batter and drying out during baking. Since both brown sugar and corn syrup contain more moisture than granulated sugar, the surface of brownies made with either of these sweeteners never dries out enough for a crisp crust to form.
BROWN SUGAR
Dull, Matte Finish
WHITE SUGAR
Shiny, Crackly Finish
MATTHEW CARD, July/August 2005
A fashion editor once said that style lies in the ability to walk across a room without having anyone notice you. What speaks for fashion, I believe, also holds true for food. Brownies, with their brash, full-frontal chocolate flavor, are the plunging necklines of baking, whereas the more subtle, butterscotch-flavored blondies have real timeless style. Of course, subtle elegance in baking is hard to come by, and that’s why blondies are often greasy, cakey, and bland. Nobody ever said style was easy.
Despite these differences, brownies and blondies are cut from similar cloth. Each includes a simple list of ingredients: flour, eggs, butter, sugar (light brown for blondies), vanilla, and salt. Brownies require the addition of melted chocolate, whereas blondie recipes call for including nuts and chocolate chips.
After I baked off a slew of remarkably similar recipes, it was clear that proportions made all the difference. Cloyingly sweet, bland, crumbly, greasy—all of these ills were readily apparent with only slight variations in ingredient amounts. I also discovered that producing great chewy texture along with good flavor was no mean feat: Having one seemed to preclude the other. I’d need to find my way around this discouraging discovery.
Blondies are prepared in two very distinct styles. The first calls for melted butter to be mixed with sugar and eggs before the dry ingredients are folded in. The second requires creaming butter and sugar until fluffy and then adding the eggs and dry ingredients. Tasters preferred melted butter versions for their dense, chewy texture (the creamed versions were too cakey). As a bonus, this approach was also simpler.
BATTER MATTERS
Most blondie recipes have close to a 1:1 ratio of light brown sugar to all-purpose flour—much more flour than is typically included in brownie recipes. The reason? Chocolate (or lack thereof). Chocolate, like flour, contains starch, and it also acts as an emulsifier, helping hold brownie batter together. When I reduced the flour to the proportions common in brownie recipes (closer to a 3:1 ratio of sugar to flour), the blondies turned into a greasy puddle. Additional testing simply left me back where I had started: using equal parts sugar and flour.
Mixing and matching sugars—adding portions of dark brown sugar or granulated sugar to the light brown sugar—did not improve the recipe. Neither did adding liquid sugars like molasses or dark corn syrup. As it turned out, light brown sugar, the choice in most recipes, worked best.
I had been using two sticks of butter (which I had melted and briefly let cool), which helped produce a pleasant chewy texture—but also made the blondies greasy. I reduced the butter a tablespoon at a time until I reached the tipping point—12 tablespoons—below which flavor and texture were compromised. I had also noticed that blondie recipes tend to call for fewer eggs than brownie recipes, and I soon found out why. More than two eggs put the texture into the “rubbery” category.
I had made some progress, but my blondies were still squat and dense, in dire need of a lift. Baking powder was the obvious answer. One teaspoon provided the lift and also contributed to the elusive chewiness I was after.
Timing also appeared to be crucial. I was baking the blondies at 350 degrees—no other temperature worked as well. When I removed them from the oven too soon, they had the pale, sticky sweetness and gummy texture of cookie dough. However, if removed too late, the blondies dried out. It seemed the usual signifiers of an adequately baked bar cookie—the cooked dough pulls away from the sides of the pan, a toothpick comes out clean—did not apply to blondies. Better indicators were color and texture: a light golden brown top that looked shiny and cracked.
ODDS AND ENDS
Now that my blondies had the proper texture, it was time to tweak their flavor. It came as no surprise that my recipe was largely improved by a dash of vanilla. I found that 1½ teaspoons gave the blondies just the right balanced aromatic flavor. As for the nuts, most recipes favor walnuts, although pecans are not unusual. Tasters liked both and were ultimately split in making a choice, so I’ve left it up to the baker. Either way, everyone agreed that browning the nuts before adding them to the dough boosted the flavor significantly. I also found that stovetop toasting (in a dry skillet) produced only faint coloring with spotty singeing; a more thorough oven toasting was the better approach.
Decreasing the amount of butter and adding toasted nuts and white chocolate chips produces blondies with great texture and dynamic flavor.
As with the choice of nuts, the test kitchen was split on the addition of chocolate chips. Half the tasters thought that chips muddied the flavors, while the rest preferred a bit of culinary counterpoint. I also tested butterscotch chips, a common addition, but one tasting confirmed my suspicion that any flavor they added would be artificial—no thanks. While buying the butterscotch chips, I picked up a bag of white chocolate chips as well. A bit to my surprise, the white chocolate chips did indeed enrich the flavor and became a key component in the recipe that everyone in the test kitchen could agree on.
Here was my final batch of blondies: chewy without being dense, sweet without being cloying, and sufficiently interesting (with the addition of nuts and white chocolate chips) to hold one’s attention beyond just one bar. Now that’s the kind of style I like.
Blondies
MAKES 36 BARS
Do not overbake the blondies; they dry out easily and will turn hard.
1½ cups (7½ ounces) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1½ cups packed (10½ ounces) light brown sugar
12 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
2 large eggs
1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup pecans or walnuts, toasted and chopped coarse
½ cup (3 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips
½ cup (3 ounces) white chocolate chips
1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Make foil sling for 13 by 9-inch baking pan by folding 2 long sheets of aluminum foil; first sheet should be 9 inches wide and second sheet should be 13 inches wide. Lay sheets of foil in pan perpendicular to each other, with extra foil hanging over edges of pan. Push foil into corners and up sides of pan, smoothing foil flush to pan. Grease foil.
2. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in medium bowl; set aside.
3. Whisk sugar and melted butter together in medium bowl until combined. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well. Using rubber spatula, fold flour mixture into egg mixture until just combined. Do not overmix. Fold in pecans and semisweet and white chocolate chips.
4. Transfer batter to prepared pan, smoothing top with rubber spatula. Bake until top is shiny and cracked and feels firm to touch, 22 to 25 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking. Transfer pan to wire rack and let cool completely. Loosen edges with paring knife; using foil overhang, lift blondies out of pan. Cut into 36 bars and serve.
variation
Keep a close eye on the coconut as it toasts because it can burn easily. Sweetened coconut is not a suitable substitute here.
Toast 1½ cups unsweetened shredded coconut on rimmed baking sheet, stirring 2 or 3 times, until light golden, 5 to 7 minutes. Proceed with recipe as directed, adding coconut with chocolate in step 3.
RAISING THE BAR
Chocolate adds more than just flavor to brownies. It contains a fair amount of starch that helps brownies hold their shape. Because blondies contain just chips (no melted chocolate), this recipe requires more flour than a brownie recipe.
MEASURE IT RIGHT
With their simple ingredient list, even a tablespoon too much or too little flour can have an impact on our Blondies. Here’s how to measure accurately.
PREFERRED Weigh flour
For the greatest accuracy, weigh flour before using it. Put a bowl on a scale, hit the “tare” button to set the scale to zero, and scoop the flour into the bowl.
SECOND-BEST Dip and sweep
Dip a dry measuring cup into the flour, sweeping away excess flour with a flat edge. This method yields more accurate results than spooning flour into a measuring cup.
MAKING A FOIL SLING
Lining the pan with a foil sling before baking prevents sticking and makes it easy to get bar cookies out of the pan. Once cool, lift the bars from the pan, transfer to a cutting board, and cut into pieces.
1. Fold long sheet of foil so it is 9 inches wide. Lay in pan, pushing foil into corners and up sides.
2. Fold second long sheet of foil so it is 13 inches wide. Lay perpendicular to first sheet. Smooth foil flush to pan, allowing extra to hang over sides.
ERIKA BRUCE, September/October 2005
What you look for in a raspberry bar is neither refined flavor nor stately appearance but the homey comfort of a triple-decker: sturdy base, jam center, and crisp streusel on top. The secret of this bar cookie’s simplicity is the dough, which serves as both bottom crust and—with a modification or two—pebbly topping. But a great-tasting raspberry bar requires just the right balance of bright, tangy fruit filling and rich, buttery shortbread. Unfortunately, I’ve had my fair share of raspberry squares that were more crumb sandwich than bar cookie. Worse than the loose crumbs was the meager layer of raspberry jam attempting feebly to hold it all together—so overcooked and leathery that the fruit flavor was gone. I was determined to find the perfect harmony of dough, fruit, and topping.
The first thing I discovered was that the economical use of a single dough for both the top and the bottom crust was, alas, problematic. The same dough responsible for a firm and sturdy bottom layer yielded a topping that was sandy and dry. Some recipe writers get around this problem by assembling two separate mixtures for the top and bottom layers, but I was loath to make more work for myself. My goal was to create a plain and simple shortbread-like bottom crust and then somehow customize a portion of this dough to end up with a successful streusel topping.
For the bottom crust, I started with a basic shortbread recipe—a simple mixture of flour, sugar, salt, and what I thought was a healthy dose of softened butter (12 tablespoons). But this crust turned out dense and chewy. I tested several methods to tenderize it, including chilling the butter before mixing it with the flour (as with biscuit or pie dough) and adding baking powder, lemon juice, or cornstarch but in the end, the answer was quite simple: increase the butter to 16 tablespoons.
But even this butter-rich dough wasn’t up to the task of forming a neat-crumbed topping for the jam. While streusel is generally on the loose side, I wanted a more cohesive topping. Adding an extra 2 tablespoons of butter (rubbed into the dough with my fingers) produced hazelnut-size crumbs that melded in the oven yet remained light and crunchy. All I had to do now was add sugar and spices. Light brown sugar lent a distinct sweetness, but spices were deemed unnecessary for these fruity bars. Instead, tasters opted for a few oats and chopped nuts for more interesting dimensions of flavor and texture.
We make raspberry bars that are tender, fruity, and crunchy by adding plenty of butter to the crust and topping and using fresh fruit along with jam for the filling.
Plain old raspberry jam was the filling of choice for most recipes, but tasters liked brighter, fruitier preserves better. Yet even the preserves lost significant flavor when cooked again in the raspberry bars. I added a dash of lemon juice with the hope that it would brighten the filling. This kept the deadening heat of the oven in check, but it didn’t fool one taster into believing there were fresh berries anywhere near these bars. The logical solution? Add fresh berries to get fresh berry flavor. But berries alone produced a mouth-puckeringly tart bar. Clearly, the viscous, sweet preserves were essential to the filling. I found success with a combination of preserves and fresh berries (lightly mashed for easier spreading), which produced a well-rounded flavor and a wonderfully moist consistency.
MAKES 24 BARS
Frozen raspberries can be substituted for fresh, but be sure to defrost them before using. Quick oats will work, but the bars will be less chewy and flavorful; do not use instant oats.
2½ cups (12½ ounces) all-purpose flour
⅔ cup (4⅔ ounces) granulated sugar
½ teaspoon salt
18 tablespoons (2¼ sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 18 pieces and softened
½ cup (1½ ounces) old-fashioned rolled oats
½ cup pecans, toasted and chopped fine
¼ cup packed (1¾ ounces) light brown sugar
¾ cup raspberry jam
3¾ ounces (¾ cup) fresh raspberries
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Make foil sling for 13 by 9-inch baking pan by folding 2 long sheets of aluminum foil; first sheet should be 13 inches wide and second sheet should be 9 inches wide. Lay sheets of foil in pan perpendicular to each other, with extra foil hanging over edges of pan. Push foil into corners and up sides of pan, smoothing foil flush to pan. Grease foil.
2. Whisk flour, granulated sugar, and salt together in bowl of stand mixer. Fit mixer with paddle and beat in 16 tablespoons butter, 1 piece at a time, on medium-low speed until mixture resembles damp sand, 1 to 1½ minutes. Set aside 1¼ cups mixture in bowl for topping.
3. Sprinkle remaining flour mixture into prepared pan and press firmly into even layer. Bake until edges of crust begin to brown, 14 to 18 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking. (Crust must still be hot when filling is added.)
4. Meanwhile, stir oats, pecans, and brown sugar into reserved topping mixture. Add remaining 2 tablespoons butter and pinch mixture between your fingers into clumps of streusel. Using fork, mash jam, raspberries, and lemon juice in small bowl until few berry pieces remain.
5. Spread berry mixture evenly over hot crust, then sprinkle with streusel. Bake until filling is bubbling and topping is deep golden brown, 22 to 25 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking.
6. Let bars cool completely in pan on wire rack, about 2 hours. Using foil overhang, remove bars from pan. Cut into 24 bars before serving. (Uncut bars can be frozen for up to 1 month; let wrapped bars thaw at room temperature for 4 hours before serving.)
variations
Thawed frozen strawberries will also work here.
Substitute strawberry jam and chopped fresh strawberries for the raspberry jam and raspberries.
Thawed frozen blueberries will also work here.
Substitute blueberry jam and fresh blueberries for the raspberry jam and raspberries.
MAKING EVEN BAR COOKIES
There are two tricks for cutting perfect square or rectangular bars. The first is using the foil sling to lift the bars from the pan before cutting. Haphazardly scoring bars while in the pan makes for uneven edges that can crumble. Cutting outside of the pan makes even lines from edge to edge. And if you want your bars to be precise, don’t just eyeball them before cutting; use a ruler to cut rows and columns at even intervals.
JAMS, JELLIES, AND PRESERVES
Fruity bar cookies such as our Raspberry Streusel Bars include a layer of jam. We also often use it to fill thumbprints and sandwich cookies. Is jam interchangeable with other fruit spreads? Jam is made from crushed or finely chopped fruit, which is cooked with pectin and sugar until the pieces of fruit are almost formless and the mixture is thickened. Preserves are similar, but they contain whole pieces or large chunks of fruit. Jam’s good fruit flavor and relatively smooth texture make it our first choice for baking. Avoid jelly; it has a wan, overly sweet taste since it’s made from just fruit juice, sugar, and pectin, so we reserve it for glazing desserts.
Washing berries before you use them is always a safe practice, and we think that the best way to wash them is to place the berries in a colander and rinse them gently under running water for at least 30 seconds. As for drying them, we’ve tested a variety of methods and have found that a salad spinner lined with a buffering layer of paper towels is the best approach.
As for storage, berries are prone to growing mold and rotting quickly. If the berries aren’t to be used immediately, we recommend cleaning the berries with a mild vinegar solution (3 cups water mixed with 1 cup white vinegar), which will destroy the bacteria, before drying them and storing them in a paper towel–lined airtight container.
MAKING RASPBERRY BARS
1. Press bottom crust firmly and evenly into foil-lined pan.
2. Spread fruit filling over hot bottom crust with spatula.
3. Sprinkle streusel evenly over filling, but resist urge to press it in.
FRESH FRUIT MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
We added fresh raspberries to preserves to get a cohesive filling that remained bright and full of raspberry flavor, even after baking.
Most pecan bars take their cue from pecan pie, with a single layer of nuts dominated by a thick, gooey, ultrasweet filling sitting atop a pat-in-the-pan crust. I’m not opposed to that style, but it’s mainly about the filling and only a little about the nuts. As a lover of nuts (pecans especially), I’ve always thought it would be great to have a bar that emphasized the star ingredient.
The closest I’ve come are recipes that ditch the rich, egg-based custard in favor of a toffee-like topping. These call for heating sugar and butter together until thickened, stirring in the nuts, and spreading the mixture over a parbaked crust before popping it into the oven. But when I tried a few such approaches, I found that the resulting bars still had a one-note sweetness that distracted from the pecans—and there were never enough pecans in the first place. My ideal was a pecan bar featuring a buttery crust piled high with nuts held in place not by a filling, per se, but by a not-too-sweet glaze whose only jobs were to enhance the flavor of the pecans and glue them to the crust. For that kind of a bar, I was on my own.
GOING NUTS
I started with a placeholder crust, a food processor–blended mixture of flour, sugar, salt, and cold butter that I borrowed from our archives and scaled up to fit a 13 by 9-inch pan (you can never have too many cookies on hand during the holidays). I patted the sandy dough into the pan and parbaked it for 20 minutes at 350 degrees until the crust was light brown—standard procedure to prevent a wet filling from seeping in and making it soggy.
Since I wanted a topping that was all about the nuts, I wondered what would happen if I simply tossed the pecans with corn syrup, which is one-third less sweet than granulated sugar, before spreading them over the crust. I tried this, stirring ½ cup into a relatively modest 2 cups of chopped pecans, which I toasted first to enhance their rich flavor. But it was a bust, as the corn syrup’s flat taste did nothing to bring out the flavor of the nuts, and now the bar wasn’t sweet enough overall. Next, I experimented with maple syrup, thinking its caramel-like flavors might complement the pecans, heating it with some butter to cut some of the sweetness and bring extra nuttiness to the glaze. Its flavors matched nicely with the pecans, but the syrup dried out and crystallized in the oven, making the topping crusty with an unappealing matte finish. Honey didn’t work either. Though it produced a moist, glossy, slightly chewy topping that my tasters liked for its texture, its prominent flavor was a distraction from the pecans. Ultimately, I landed on a combination of corn syrup and brown sugar, the latter’s molasses-like notes a good match for the pecans. I heated ½ cup of corn syrup and ¾ cup of brown sugar with 7 tablespoons of butter on the stove until the mixture was bubbly and syrupy; I then took the glaze off the heat and stirred in vanilla extract to add complexity, followed by the pecans. This glaze had a lot going for it: It was glossy and stayed slightly moist and chewy in the oven. But its sweetness still dominated the pecans. I wondered if I could fix that simply by increasing the amount of nuts, which had been my goal anyway.
I upped the nuts from 2 cups to 3 cups and left them in halves, which gave them a more impressive presence. This worked so well to offset the glaze’s sweetness that I added another cup. The nuts were now the main event of the topping, enhanced but not overpowered by the glaze. There was another bonus: With this many pecans, the nuts did not sit neatly in a single layer on the crust but were more haphazardly layered on top of one another, allowing for a variety of textures—some nuts were chewy, sitting directly in a slick of glaze, while those sitting on the very top were crisp.
CRUST CONTROL
With the topping settled, I turned my attention back to the crust. I’d been using the food processor to cut the cold butter into the flour, but it occurred to me that there was an even easier crust I could use. In our French Apple Tart, we make an easy press-in crust using melted butter instead of chilled, stirring it right into the dry ingredients. Buttery and sturdy, this shortbread-like crust was ideal for the pecan topping and a snap to make.
Swapping the traditional custard filling for a mixture of brown sugar, corn syrup, and butter streamlines this classic recipe.
I had an additional thought: Now that the topping was barely wet at all, did I even need to parbake the crust? I tried skipping this step, spreading the hot topping over the unbaked crust and baking it for 20 minutes. When I turned the bars out of the pan, I found that the bottom of the crust was still pale and slightly pliable. Baking the bars on the bottom rack and for a little longer produced a crust that was evenly golden, but it also created a new problem: Since the bars were closer to the heat source, more moisture was evaporating from the topping, which was getting crunchy and brittle in parts, especially at the edges.
Up until now I had been boiling the glaze on the stove before adding the nuts. If I didn’t do that, I thought, maybe enough moisture would stay in the glaze to keep the topping more pliable. Plus, it would make the recipe even quicker. It was worth trying.
For my next test, I combined the brown sugar, corn syrup, vanilla, and salt in a bowl. I melted the butter separately and then stirred it, piping hot, into the mixture so the sugar would melt, continuing to stir until the mixture was homogeneous and glossy. But it was so thick that after I stirred in the nuts, there was no question of spreading it evenly across the crust. All I could do was push it to the edges as best I could, leaving patches of crust bare. I was sure this was a dead end, but as I watched the bars cook, I could see the thick brown sugar mixture begin to melt. After 25 minutes, the topping was bubbling across the crust, and all the empty spots were completely coated.
Once the bars were cooled, I turned them out of the pan. They were golden brown on the bottom, with a glossy, even sheen on top. I trimmed the edges to neaten them up and cut them into squares. The bars were chewy and moist, not overly sweet, and loaded with pecans. For a final touch, I sprinkled the bars with flake sea salt as they came out of the oven.
Ultranutty Pecan Bars
MAKES 24 BARS
Use pecan halves, not pieces. The edges of the bars will be slightly firmer than the center. If desired, trim ¼ inch from the edges before cutting into bars.
Crust
1¾ cups (8¾ ounces) all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons (2⅔ ounces) granulated sugar
½ teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Topping
¾ cup packed (5¼ ounces) light brown sugar
½ cup light corn syrup
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and hot
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon salt
4 cups (1 pound) pecan halves, toasted
½ teaspoon flake sea salt (optional)
1. For the crust: Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Make foil sling for 13 by 9-inch baking pan by folding 2 long sheets of aluminum foil; first sheet should be 13 inches wide and second sheet should be 9 inches wide. Lay sheets of foil in pan perpendicular to each other, with extra foil hanging over edges of pan. Push foil into corners and up sides of pan, smoothing foil flush to pan. Lightly spray foil with vegetable oil spray.
2. Whisk flour, sugar, and salt together in medium bowl. Add melted butter and stir with wooden spoon until dough begins to form. Using your hands, continue to combine until no dry flour remains and small portion of dough holds together when squeezed in palm of your hand. Evenly scatter tablespoon-size pieces of dough over surface of pan. Using your fingertips and palm of your hand, press and smooth dough into even thickness in bottom of pan.
3. For the topping: Whisk sugar, corn syrup, melted butter, vanilla, and salt in medium bowl until smooth (mixture will look separated at first but will become homogeneous), about 20 seconds. Fold pecans into sugar mixture until nuts are evenly coated.
4. Pour topping over crust. Using spatula, spread topping over crust, pushing to edges and into corners (there will be bare patches). Bake until topping is evenly distributed and rapidly bubbling across entire surface, 23 to 25 minutes.
5. Transfer pan to wire rack and lightly sprinkle with flake sea salt, if using. Let bars cool completely in pan on rack, about 1½ hours. Using foil overhang, lift bars out of pan and transfer to cutting board. Cut into 24 bars and serve. (Bars can be stored at room temperature for up to 5 days.)
TOPPING CLUMPS? NOT TO WORRY
To streamline our Ultranutty Pecan Bars recipe, we skipped the step of heating the topping on the stovetop. Instead, we simply stirred together a mixture of brown sugar, corn syrup, melted butter, vanilla and salt, folded in our toasted pecans, and spread the thick mixture as best we could over the crust. Don’t worry if there are bare patches: The topping melts during baking, distributing itself evenly over the crust and covering up all of the bare spots.
HOW TO TOAST NUTS
Nuts toast more evenly in the oven, but the stovetop is more convenient for small amounts.
IN THE OVEN Spread nuts in single layer on rimmed baking sheet and toast in 350-degree oven until fragrant and slightly darkened, 8 to 12 minutes, shaking sheet halfway through.
ON THE STOVETOP Place nuts in single layer in dry skillet set over medium heat and toast, stirring frequently, until fragrant and slightly darkened, 3 to 5 minutes.
