Cooking For Engineers

[guest chef]

a thing that also would have made a difference besides volume of flour is this: cookie dough should be chilled before baking. chilling the dough allows two things: the flour hydrates and absorbs the liquids more completely and the fat, especially butter, re-solidifies and takes that little bit longer to liquify in the oven. both of these are as much a factor in preventing spread as the differing flour amounts. the extra flour can make up for the lack of resting and chilling, but culinary schools (and in home economics classes back in the day) students are taught to chill the dough and thus save the cost of extra flour. no big deal for 40-ish grams in a single batch, but a major savings when baking larger quantities whether as a a parent back in the day when doing everything from scratch was normal and you therefore used enough flour to notice the difference of cooking wastefully over the weeks of months, or a manufacturer of packaged cookies saving 4000 kilos of flour a year.

pastry dough and bread dough should also be rested between preparation and use. for the same reasons of hydration and solidifying the fats, and also for relaxing the gluten development when using higher gluten flours than one uses for cookies.

another variable: it is also better to have enough sheet pans, or enough time, to put each new batch of raw cookies onto a cold sheet pan. if your tests were happening one after another in a warm kitchen on warm pans, this was also a factor of the spread rates of the different amounts of flour.

[sensiblewall]

im a newbie to cooking and just thankful that i am learning a lot in this thread

[Shannon78]

For a long time, I was looking for this recipe, and finally, I found it on your website.
I'm going to test it and get you back for feedback =)

Shannon Lege

[jvanderh]

Thank you so much! I bake exclusively by weight, and I could tell mine weren't coming out quite right. I had the flour at 160 and the brown sugar at 75.