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to chill the dough in. (While the dough is still warm, it tends to spread a little on a flat baking sheet.)
Without baguette pans check the dough after 15 minutes of chilling and re-shape it to a nice round
cylinder if it has flattened a little.
The cold dough is easy to slice into thin cookies with a thin-bladed very sharp knife that you
place directly on a baking sheet. These cookies are quick and easy to make, but remember to
schedule time to chill the dough (an hour or two). The dough keeps well in the refrigerator for many
days and freezes well for future use. Refrigerator cookie dough is handy to have—they take little
space and ready to bake faster than your oven preheats.
What happens in the oven
Here is what happens to cookies in the oven, in three short acts:
1. In the first phase the dough starts to expand from the heat, and the moisture evaporates
increasingly faster.
2. In the second phase the dough becomes hotter, continues to expand and lose more
moisture. Color begins to develop through complex chemical reactions (both browning reaction and
caramelization).
3
. The final phase is short. There is little moisture left, the dough starts to thin and color
develops quickly.
There is an additional phase that follows quickly after #3 if you forget to set your timer. The
color turns from brown to black, heavy smoke develops and charcoal begins to form. Smoke alarms
go off.
During baking sugar and fat melt from the heat in the dough, the sugar dissolves, starch and
proteins swell and a structure begins to set in. If the dough is rich in sugar and fat, there is not
enough moisture for the proteins to set and the starch to gelatinize completely. This has two
consequences: the structure is not very rigid, so as the cookies cool, they partially collapse and
develop the familiar pretty cracks on top. This is desirable in many cookies because it makes them
chewy and attractive.
The second consequence, longer shelf life, doesn't matter as much for home-baked cookies.
If they are good, they will disappear without lengthy storage.
Perhaps the most problems home bakers experience with cookies is too much spread while
baking. Instead of the neat, little, compact thing that you find in commercial packages, you may get
a flat cookie with thickness of a penny but size of your palm. Or, even worse thing happened to me,
as all the neatly-shaped cookies on the cookies sheet spread into each other, producing one giant,
flat cookie the size and shape of your baking sheet. Why, and how do you remedy it?
Cookies spread for several reasons. If your fat is butter, your dough tends to spread more
than if your fat is vegetable shortening. Butter melts over a narrow range but not shortening. If
butter melts before the dough structure had a chance to set up, your cookies end up flat and thin. But
if the structure sets up before the butter had a chance to melt, you win and you get neat, compact,
thick cookies. The solution? Keep the cookie dough chilled before it goes in the oven, so the butter
needs longer to melt. Chill it in the refrigerator, cookie sheet and all, and pop it in the preheated
oven straight from the refrigerator.
Another solution is to use vegetable shortening as fat but than you lose the wonderful
buttery taste, and the flavor is closer to a commercial packaged cookie. Try a compromise: use half
butter, half vegetable shortening. If you prefer the full buttery flavor, chill the dough.
play © erdosh 315
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