Chocolate Dot Cookies: or, They're really good if I can stop ranting

Today, we are attempting chocolate chip cookies from Canada!

Chocolate Dot Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup white sugar ¼ cup brown sugar, lightly packed 1 egg, beaten 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup sifted all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon baking soda 1 cup (or 6 ounces) chocolate chips ½ cup chopped nuts, if desired Heat oven to 350°. Have greased or paper-lined cookie sheets ready. Beat the shortening until soft. Gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Add egg and vanilla, beat well. Sift in the flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix into the batter. Stir in the chocolate chips. Drop by the spoonful onto the pans. Bake 10-12 minutes. Makes about 3 dozen cookies. Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, 1968 via Imgur

This comes to us from Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, published by the Canadian magazine of the same name, by way of a recipe swap group. 

Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, 1968

From this uneducated foreigner's perspective, Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking looks like a "standard kitchen text" of Canada.  You know, one of those cookbooks that countless people got as a housewarming or wedding present, or  bought with their first saucepans. If anyone from Canada is reading this, do let me know: is this one of those "I learned to cook from my Mom's copy" books that nearly everyone had?

For various personal reasons, I am suspicious of chocolate chip cookie recipes. They always turn into runny splats unless I add a lot more flour than the recipe thinks I should. But every recipe I've tried came from the United States. Maybe Canada can do better.

Our adventure with Chatelaine starts off with shortening. I am leery of shortening unless I'm brushing it onto a hot pizzelle iron. But after an endless succession of chocolate chip cookies that melted into sad splats onto the pan, I was willing to give it a go. After all, shortening has a higher melting point than butter, which might help the cookies hold themselves together long enough to bake properly.

At the sight of the brown and white sugars almost but not quite commingling, I thought "Look at that Canadian marbling!"

As we reached the end of mixing, I was surprised and delighted to see that this recipe uses roughly equal amounts of chocolate chips and cookie dough.

Now, I was almost willing to risk an entire panload of cookie dough without testing a single cookie first. The recipe seemed sound, and the dough felt right. But after so many runny failures, I don't think I can let myself trust any chocolate chip cookie recipe. Even the recipe on the Toll House bag, the one that literally introduced chocolate chip cookies to the world, turned into sad splats until I added a truly uncalled-for amount of extra flour.

 

When I pulled the cookie out, I was not as surprised as I thought I would be. It's true that the recipe comes from Canada (which seems to endorse it for reasons I can't explain), and the dough didn't seem as "floppy" as all of our earlier cookie failures. But apparently chocolate chip cookies are treacherous business.

And now, I would like interrupt this recipe with a rant.

Whenever I flip through baking and recipe forums, there's always a steady flow of people asking "Why did my cookies come out flat?" (More often than not, it's chocolate chip cookies.) And people will (un)helpfully answer with the same incorrect myths. They'll ask "Did you refrigerate the dough? Did you thoroughly cream the butter and sugar? Did you use a dark pan or a light one? Were your eggs cold or room temperature? Did you set your oven too low?" The "advice" I see the most often is the false claim that refrigerating the dough overnight will "hydrate" the flour, thus allegedly helping the cookies not melt so badly.

I have tried all of those things. I've jockeyed with the oven thermostat. I have gently mixed the butter (or shortening) and sugar, and I have also beaten "until pale-colored and very light." I have refrigerated the cookie dough, and I have also pre-shaped it and then frozen the individual unbaked cookies until ice-solid. And while all of those things can change how the cookies come out, they will not fix a runny dough. 

It infuriates me to see these myths persist in various comment sections, because then people try them. And when they don't work, the people baking at home blame themselves and get frustrated.

If your cookie dough is too runny, the only fix is to stir in more flour.

If you think about it, cookies that are supposed to spread are more finicky than almost anything that people bake. If you don't get the dough exactly right, it either turns into a hot runny mess, or it bakes into hardened dough clods. Even things like shortbread, which are supposed to keep their shape, are more forgiving. If you add a bit too much flour to them, they'll just be extra-firm rather than ruined. 

This brings me to my next complaint: I can't stand the myth that if you measure your ingredients exactly right, things will always come out as predictably as a chemical reaction from a science textbook. Reality is messier than a splattered countertop. 

Cookies* are technically "freestanding loaves" if you stretch that term as far as pedantically possible. Most other bread recipes give a range of flour instead of a single-number amount. Or at least, most recipes that are written by actual people instead of content farms do.

When skimming the ingredient list for most breads, you tend to see things like "3 to 5 cups flour" or "3 cups flour (approx)." The directions usually go on to tell you what kind of dough you want (springy, soft and slightly sticky, very firm, etc), so that you can make sure you get the flour right. But in cookie recipes, I have only seen this natural variability acknowledged once. On the Mirro cookie press instruction sheet, they wrote "Do not [emphasis theirs] add all of the flour specified in the recipe before first trying the dough for consistency. Due to variations in flour or the size of eggs it sometimes becomes necessary to omit some of the flour or to add an additional one or two tablespoons." (Of course, it would have helped if they said what consistency the dough should be. But they still did better than everyone else.) 

It is impossible for recipe writers to control for variations in wheat crops, your local humidity, or how much water is in your butter and eggs. Sure, simply saying "mix in two cups of flour" sounds more assured than "add enough flour to make a firm dough." But it is a lie.

Speaking of wheat crops, I think something might be amiss in this year's harvest. Granted, I know nothing about the art and science of wheat cultivation. But it seems like I've been adding extra flour to everything lately. I made a batch of oatmeal carmelitas the other week, and the dough looked like this. Keep in mind that that you're supposed to crumble it over everything else. 

I went to the book and double-checked the recipe to make sure I measured everything right, then I checked it again because I knew something was surely amiss. But either the book has a typing error in the ingredient list, or flour today just isn't what it used to be. I ended up nearly doubling the flour before I could "press into the pan" or "sprinkle remaining dough on top" like the recipe said I should. 

More recently, I made a batch of chocolate waffle iron cookies.  Now, waffles are more forgiving of measuring errors than a lot of other recipes. They are molded in from all sides, so the batter or dough (depending on the recipe) literally cannot go astray while it's cooking. Guess which ones have exactly as much flour as written. 

Also, I have made this recipe as written many times. This is a new failure.

Getting back to Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, I added just enough flour that the dough didn't stick to my fingers anymore but was still very soft. It was a lot more than the one or two spoons I expected. But the cookies came out of the oven just fine with their extra dose of wheat. I put one of the sad and flat original cookies next to the extra-floury ones for comparison.

If you take anything from today's adventure of cooking, forget all that business of twiddling with the oven temperature dial or trying to refrigerate your cookie dough to magically "hydrate" it. Just add more flour and your cookies will be fine.

As for today's recipe, these are really good if you like your chocolate chip cookies crispy. They're also very rich, so you feel sated after just a few. For this reason, I think they'd be great for parties. Everyone will like them (well, everyone who likes chocolate chip cookies anyway), but most people will be satisfied after just a few. So you don't need to make a quadruple-batch of them the day before. 

With that said, I think these would be better with a little bit of cinnamon in them. But I'm willing to salute Canadian magazine recipe writers, even if they launched me into a long rant about flour and bad advice. The empty cookie jar tells me all I need to know. 

 

 

 

 

*or more specifically: flour-based cookies that are baked in individual portions on a flat pan, as opposed to bar cookies, anything baked in individual molds, and other types not enumerated here. ↪