Butter Alert! Are things too moist in your kitchen?

Have you thought about the moisture content of your butter lately?

This post is loosely dedicated to a commenter who wrote that they tried Maxine Menster's cookies and the dough came out too runny. They said that they even went out of their way to purchase-- and pay for!-- stick-type margarine as specified in the recipe. When I read their comment, I wrote that the dough is supposed to be a bit runnier than expected (which it is), and that it will harden in the refrigerator (which it does).

However, I recently made the cookies again (they make regular appearances at this house) and the dough seemed runnier than usual. I refrigerated it anyway, secure in the knowledge that I have made this recipe countless times and it has never failed.

The thoroughly chilled dough was trickier to work with than usual, but again, I felt no worry. When you've made a recipe ten times, you assume that it will be the same on the eleventh. However, the cookies melted in the oven and barely resembled cookies when they were done. 

At first, I blamed myself. Then, the same problem showed up when I made a batch of chatters. Again, I've made these cookies many times. But for whatever reason, these chatters spread out so much that they fell apart when I tried to get them off the pan. They look like I squashed them after baking, don't they?

For reference, chatters usually come out looking like this:

At first, I blamed myself. I figured I must have mismeasured something. But this problem showed up again when I made chocolate chip cookies for a friend. 

As we all know, the best way to ruin a recipe is to make it for someone else. Baked goods always like to embarrass you in front of witnesses. Nevertheless, I didn't foresee any problems. (Also, no one talks about this, but chocolate chip cookies are actually kind of finicky to make.)

I made the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag, as countless people have done before me. I should note that many of my preteen batches of chocolate chip cookies ended up discreetly going to the trash (or at least they should have). But this time, I told myself that most of us are terrible bakers at the age of nine. Having since learned the importance of things like correctly measuring the ingredients, surely I wouldn't bake multiple pans of future compost. Besides, I was making chocolate chip cookies of all things! I wasn't doing something notoriously failure-prone like those foofy macarons that have been such an Instagram and wedding trend in the last few years.

The cookie dough looked just like I remembered, tasted just like remembered, and they came out just as terribly as the first time I made them.

Now, if you go online you will find fifty million possible fixes for this problem (many of which are on websites that may be entirely the work of bots with no human intervention). But the only one that works is adding more flour. No amount of adding refrigerating the dough or jockeying with the oven temperature will turn puddles into cookies, and it doesn't matter if the person claiming otherwise is wearing a chef's hat.

After angrily dumping the first batch of cookies directly into the trash without bothering to let them cool off, I threw a lot of flour into the bowl and rage-beat it into the dough with a wooden spoon that somehow didn't snap on me. I don't know how much I added, but it was a lot. We weren't twiddling with teaspoons of flour here, but fundamentally altering the recipe. Then, just to be very sure I wasn't about to throw away the rest of the chocolate chips and the dough they rode in on, I baked a single cookie to ensure I had everything right.

It looked so lonely in the cavernous oven, and I wrestled with the conflicting guilts of wasting electricity versus wasting ingredients. Chocolate may grow on trees, but grocery money doesn't. Ultimately, guilt from wasting chocolate won out over guilt from running a hot oven on a hot night to bake cookies one at a time. 

Happily, our extra-floury test cookie came out perfect. As I (successfully!) baked the rest of the cookies, I couldn't help wondering why they came out so badly when I made them as written. Did Nestle change the recipe? 

Fortunately for my doubts, the internet has everything, including people photographing old food packaging. I found a picture of a chocolate bag from (I think) the 1930s, and the recipe was the same.

Source: Old Recipes on Reddit

If you wanted to be painfully pedantic, you could point out that in the 1930s you were supposed to dissolve the baking soda in a little water, and today they tell you to simply stir it in. And the older recipe tells you to chop the chocolate because chocolate chips hadn't been invented yet. (In the early days, they sold a specially-molded chocolate bar just for these cookies, which was scored to break into very small pieces. It came with a special tool for breaking it up.) But aside from those truly pointless nitpicks, the recipe is the same.

So, I had made the recipe correctly. The recipe itself hadn't changed. Nor had I miscalculated anything when halving the ingredients. While eating some of the cookies and wondering why they couldn't come out so perfect when I actually made the recipe exactly as written, I remembered reading some online cooking-forum angst about watery butter.

Apparently post-2020 butter has more water in it than it used to. This has been ruining countless people's recipes, no matter how successfully they've made them before. (As a quick aside, true baking experts-- and people trying to look impressive-- use the term "moisture content" instead of "water." It sounds more authoritative.) Of course, all butter contains water and always has. But apparently post-2020 butter is simply too moist to be reliable.

Normally, I care about the "moisture content" of my butter as much as everyone else I know: not at all. Furthermore, I figured that all the people complaining about faulty water-to-fat ratios were making much more finicky things than I do. I wasn't making a Frisian Domme Snobbersguod torte, I was making chocolate chip cookies! Nevertheless, the problem of watery butter had at last come to my kitchen and sabotaged me.

So, if you are having problems with runny cookie dough, you have two options. The easiest: Add more flour!

The second option requires a bit of planning ahead. First, melt your butter. Get it really hot, not just barely melted. Then, pour it into a small bowl or cup so it hardens into a block instead of a flat disc. Let it sit out at room temperature for an hour or two so the water (or "moisture content" if you prefer) can separate out and sink to the bottom. Then refrigerate the butter until it is hard. You can now lift out the butter and discard the water it left behind.

In these times of uncertain butter and inconsistent oleo, I must also recommend baking a single cookie before committing an entire pan of them to the oven. It may be an extravagance of energy, but it's better than possibly sending your grocery money directly to the dump.

Whatever you do, be careful with your butter and your oleo! Treachery and betrayal are packed into those boxes.