Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies

A recipe by Baking Day with Anna Olson

The Perfect Combination

Todays recipe to review is from A Baking Day with Anna Olson and is found on page 119; Triple Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies.

It’s hard to improve on this famous combination, but check out my tips for even a better cookie.

Ingredients

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Many oatmeal cookies are dry, cakey, and overly spiced. To make this dense and chewy, I combined unsaturated fat (vegetable oil) and saturated fat (butter) in a ratio of nearly 3 to 1, and reduced the proportion of flour. Adding an extra egg yolk boosts moistness and richness, while a touch more salt than most recipes call for tempers the sweetness and complements the oaty flavor. Most recipes call for using a stand mixer, but I found this counterproductive to the goal of chewy, dense cookies because the mixer beats air into the dough. Instead I make the dough by hand, melting the butter for easier mixing. Browning the butter delivers more complexity, and blooming a small amount of cinnamon in the butter rounds out its flavour.

 


Blooming Your Spices

When it comes to baking, most of us just whisk ground spices into the dry ingredients without a second thought. But there is another way: the spice-blooming technique.

Heating the spices in butter works well because the flavor compounds in certain spices are fat-soluble. That means that hot fat (oil or butter, usually) will extract those compounds, flavoring the fat. This well-flavored fat can then be dispersed throughout a dish better than a teaspoon of dry, crushed spices can.

 

 

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Preparing to Bake

Do you ever why so many cookie recipes call for resting the dough in fridge before baking. Here are three reasons why this is a really important step.

1. TASTE

- the flavour becomes more concentrated

- as dough chills, it loses moisture: this in turn, concentrates the remaining ingredients

2. TEXTURE

- when dough rests, it’s sugar levels become more concentrated as excess moisture is absorbed

- the higher the percentage of sugar in the dough, the more likely your cookies will turn out chewy on the inside and crispy on the outside

3. SHAPE

- chilling the dough solidifies the fat, making the cookies less likely to spread during baking

**NOTE**

At the bakery our cookie dough always rested for 48hr minimum

Using a cookie scoop will give you uniform cookies.

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The Results

I can’t really review this recipe since I did not follow per cookbook. I have made SO many oatmeal cookies at the bakery, if you would like my recipe let me know. 

This is a community cookbook club where we want to see your photos of your end result. Don't forget to tag your photos on instagram with @smidgencookbookclub or post your photo on our facebook Bake Along with Smidgen

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