Curious Cookies
My mom’s cookies broke all the rules, but to me, they were perfect.
Here’s how most chocolate-chip cookie recipes go: in a mixing bowl, cream sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Dribble in eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, then sprinkle in chocolate chips and stir just to combine. Drop identical dollops of cookie dough onto a baking sheet, leaving gaps between neighbours. Bake into perfectly golden-brown cookies, evenly studded with chocolate chips.
Here’s how my mom made cookies: in a saucepan, melted margarine and sugar. Cracked an egg in, and stirred furiously to minimize scrambling. Dumped in a mixture of whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Tossed in a few handfuls of miniature carob chips, then mixed roughly until the batter came together. Slapped the batter onto an ungreased cookie sheet, glossing over instructions like “place the cookies two inches apart.” Baked one enormous frankencookie that covered the entire pan, snapped off the blackened edges, and divided it into rough squares.
I was the only kid at school with square cookies, but it didn’t bother me. I didn’t know the difference between creaming and melting the fat, that butter and margarine have different properties, or that whole-wheat flour can make baked goods dense and heavy. And I certainly didn’t know that carob is a legume masquerading as chocolate.
For every recipe that begins, “cream the butter and sugar,” there’s someone who looks confused. It simply means to mix the butter and sugar vigorously until light and fluffy, but it might as well be secret code, because there’s no way for you to figure that out. By creaming, you incorporate air, thereby creating a lighter, fluffier cookie.
When my mom melted, rather than creamed, the margarine and sugar, she set things up for flat, dense cookies. Even worse, the melted margarine resulted in a warm, fluid batter that gave the cookies no choice but to smoosh into each other as they baked into a crisp carob-chip pancake.
Hydrogenated vegetable fats — like margarine and shortening — lead to crisper, crumblier cookies with little flavour. When it comes to chocolate chip, I prefer butter. Aside from being tasty, it results in a cookie that spreads slightly when it bakes, leading to crispy edges and soft centres. So why did she use margarine?
In the ’80s, there was a backlash against saturated fats. Consumption of red meat plummeted, prompting pork to advertise itself as “the other white meat.” Sales of skinless, boneless chicken breast shot through the roof. And well-meaning people, like my mom, eschewed butter in favour of margarine. And not just any margarine — hard margarine, sold in bricks, full of trans-fatty acids that have since been linked to heart disease. Whoops.
While she was substituting margarine for butter, my mom also swapped out all-purpose flour for whole wheat. Whole-wheat flour, as the name suggests, is milled from the entire wheat grain, and so contains the bran, germ, and endosperm. All that added stuff can throw off the balance of dry and wet ingredients in a recipe, so simply substituting whole-wheat for all-purpose flour can be risky. Dry, crumbly cookies weren’t the only result; I also ate my share of hockey puck muffins.
Finally, let’s be clear: carob is not chocolate. It’s a legume. In some countries, carob is a legitimate food, used as a sweetener and in hot drinks. When I was growing up, carob was faux chocolate, synonymous with health-conscious hippies. It came from a bulk food store that smelled like stale spices, and it tasted like dirt — with a hint of cumin and coriander, common carob neighbours in the bulk food section.
To this day, my mom hates to cook and baking mystifies her. Still, my childhood memories are punctuated with a steady stream of square chocolate-chip cookies. When I was small, my mom sat me on the kitchen counter while she made them. From my perch, I stared intently at the kitchen floor, lost in the kaleidoscope of orange, brown, and avocado blotches on the linoleum.
One day, I was old enough to unwrap the pre-portioned bricks of margarine from their waxed paper. And when I could see above the counter, we made square cookies together. I remember scraping a spoon across the bottom of the saucepan, the crunch of the sugar, the smell of the margarine. Those cookies may have broken all the rules, but to me, they were perfect.
Sneaky Whole-Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies
These handsome cookies are crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and full of melty chocolate goodness. You’d never guess that they contain whole-wheat flour, which lends a pleasant chewiness and nuttiness without being heavy or dense.
Patience is a virtue, especially where these cookies are involved. First, to avoid scrambled eggs, make sure your butter-sugar mixture has cooled to room temperature before you add the eggs. Second, chill the cookie batter for at least two hours before baking, to give the butter enough time to re-solidify. And if you are saintly enough to wait for the dough to rest overnight, the cookies are even better.
Makes 24 cookies.
½ cup (114 g) butter
¾ cup (150 g) brown sugar
¼ cup (55 g) granulated sugar
¾ cup (95 g) all-purpose flour
½ cup (80 g) whole-wheat flour
¾ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
¾ teaspoon vanilla
3 oz (81 g) dark chocolate (70–80% cocoa solids), coarsely chopped
In a medium saucepan, heat butter, brown sugar, and sugar over low-medium heat. Stir occasionally until the butter melts. Remove from the heat and set aside for 15 minutes or until it cools to room temperature.
In a medium bowl, combine all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate. Set aside.
When the butter-sugar mixture is room temperature, add the egg and vanilla to the saucepan. (CAUTION: If the butter-sugar mixture is still warm, you will cook your eggs.) Using a spatula, stir to incorporate. Add the flour mixture and stir just until there are no flecks of flour remaining. Transfer the batter to a sheet of plastic wrap, wrap tightly, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours until firm, and preferably overnight.
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease two cookie sheets, or line them with parchment.
Break off teaspoon-sized balls of dough and roll them into balls, allowing at least 10cm between nearest neighbours. Flatten each ball to a thickness of 1.5 cm. Bake for 12–14 minutes until golden brown on top. Let the cookies cool for one minute on the cookie sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack.
Note: Refrigerated cookie dough will keep for three days. Alternately, you can bake and cool all the cookies, then freeze the extras.
This story was included in Best Food Writing 2012, an anthology edited by the inimitable Holly Hughes.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Edible Vancouver & Wine Country. Many thanks to Debbra Mikaelsen and Viktoria Cseh for editing.
