And often, mastering perfectly textured springy cake or supremely chewy-crisp cookies is more about baking technique than it is about ingredients. But recently, I learned that there is a single ingredient that can make almost every baked good better: milk powder.
Her Mint Cookies and Cream Cookie Pie calls for a tablespoon of nonfat milk powder, which gets mixed in with the flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda before you combine them with softened butter and sugar.
And though Ganeshram often makes cookies with milk powder, she finds the ingredient especially useful when baking bread. It helps sandwich breads rise higher, she says, and it makes flatbreads, like her paratha roti , more tender.
But liquid milk also adds water to batters and doughs, too much of which can ruin the texture of the finished baked good. Tender, flaky roti —all thanks to the driest milk of them all. Whisking about two teaspoons of milk powder with the flour, sugar, and baking powder before adding in any water is her foolproof trick to making soft and tender roti—a challenge she wrestled with for years. Ganeshram cautions that the fat in full-fat dairy makes the end result of any baked good more moist.
But, this recipe OMG what to say. I may have added a little over on chocolate and added a cup of pecans chopped. This recipe I will make again, and again over and over. Hi Cheryl, Yay!! Thank you so much!! Are these crispy in the middle? One of my relatives has a thick crunchy chocolate chip cookie recipe that she will NOT share. We have been trying to replicate it for a lifetime.
Her cookies are crispy all the way through with a slight chew in the middle. Hi Sunshine! Alas… probably not the one. These are pretty chewy. I vote wooing your relative to release the recipe! Still trying to find a recipe that a bakery used to make as a child. It was crispy and almost powdery. I guess others are looking for the same. I just made these and doubled them. I used two cups brown sugar to one cup white sugar.
Thank you. These are fantastic tips Karen, thank you!! I wonder if the bakery used mostly shortening? A lot of bakeries use shortening instead of butter because of cost. I love the idea of the two cups brown sugar.
That will add a depth and maybe make them crispier? Some recipes call for a teaspoon of cornstarch in the recipe. I thought texture was slightly powdery. My mom has been using the recipe for decades. Thank you! Just tried this recipe and my cookies turned out flat!
Think of gluten as a slinky. This protein, like a slinky can stretch and expand which means it can provide lots of structure and shape aka rolling it into thin sheets of puffy pastry , can trap gasses aka carbon dioxide when baking bread , and provide that chewiness we love think breads, and al dente pastas.
And different types of flour will have different protein contents. Which means the amount of gluten that forms will vary based on the type of flour that you choose to use. And how much mixing you do. Of course to fully understand what happened with each cookie batch made with the different flours. Different flours have different protein contents. The higher the protein content, the more structure it will provide for your cookies.
Listed below are protein contents of the most common flours you might use:. If you are going to stock one flour in your pantry make it this one. It can be found as bleached or unbleached. Best Used For: This is the staple flour you should have on hand. It can be used for pretty much any baking recipe- of course cookies. Bread flour is my go to flour if I want a chewy texture..
The higher protein content creates more gluten. More gluten formation means more carbon dioxide will be trapped between the strands of gluten which will help to make that bread or pizza dough rise. Best Used For: Yeasted breads, pizza dough, and pastry doughs like puff pastry.
But this flour can also be used to give more structure to your chocolate chip cookies. This is your go to flour for cakes and other baked goods where tenderness is favorable. You can try making your cake flour. Best Used For : Cakes of course.
Duh, right? Especially for certain types of cakes like angel food, genoise or sponge cakes. And with that being said, I like using cake flour in my cupcakes too. But you can also try using cake flour in your muffins, scones, even your cookies for a tender baked good in the end.
You will also notice a difference in color with this flour and that is again due to the fact that all 3 parts of the kernel are used. Of course there are varieties of whole wheat flours as well. I commonly will either use whole wheat flour, white whole wheat flour, or whole wheat pastry flour. Pro Tip: I like to replace half of the flour called for in a recipe, with whole wheat flour.
How To Store It : This flour can benefit from being stored in your freezer or fridge. It does not have as long as a shelf life as the whiter flours do. You can read in depth to all the different types of flour and their uses here. So besides choosing the right type of flour. The perfect cookie will also come down to measuring your flour correctly.
Because most Americans measure by volume aka you use your measuring cups instead of by weight using a kitchen scale the amount of flour that ends up in the cup can vary. I think of it like packing a suitcase. We can all pack it different. Pack it light. The airports know this so when you get to there, what do they do? They weigh the bag. Same goes for measuring your flour. We can pack different amounts of flour into the cup.
So best practice is of course to use a kitchen scale so there is no room for error. But if you are using your dry measuring cups I get it, I still do too then remember these three things:. Ok the part you have been waiting for. Which flour is best is for your cookies. First of that depends really on what you are wanting to achieve. So here is what I did — I tested the same recipe recipe is attached of chocolate chip cookies. The only thing I changed was the type of flour.
The rest stayed the same — same cookie sheet, oven temperature, creaming time and the rest of the ingredients. This cookie was chewy with crisp edges. Here are the results of the cookie tests I did with changing the type or amount of flour used. As you can tell just by changing the flour resulted in quite a different cookie each time. This I think was by far my favorite out of all the cookie tests.
The bread flour gave it a little more structure due to the higher protein content. It was softy, chewy, with crisp edges. Just the way I like my cookies. Because cake flour has a lower protein content this cookie I found was a bit softer and more delicate.
And the color of the cookie was also a bit paler. This cookie was probably the closest in texture and appearance compared to the control recipe. Because bleached flour has a slightly lower protein content than unbleached flour due to the bleaching process, it did change the texture slightly. This cookie definitely was the most different than the control recipe. But that was to be expected. The cookie was much darker in color because whole wheat flour contains the darker outer layer, called the bran.
But if you want to make a cookie that has more nutrients that this is definitely something worth trying. You might also like using white whole wheat flour. You get all the nutrients but a much softer flour. I think this test was one my favorites to see what happened. It definitely was my least favorite because it almost was a bit dry and crumbly.
This cookie obviously spread the most.
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