Idle Time

For many years I’ve used Michael Chu’s telling of the chocolate chip cookie recipe printed on every Nestlé Toll House chocolate chips bag. Chu’s version is the recipe that radicalized me into using a scale to measure flour; to this day, I use 360 grams of flour for a full batch, or (more often) 180 grams for a half batch, and I pay no attention at all to how many cups that is.

But part of Chu’s telling has always stuck in my mind:

… Nestlé’s recipe only states: “2 ¹⁄₄ cups all-purpose flour”. Is this flour sifted (as all flour should be before measuring), unsifted, or settled for one year and then packed down to fit as much as possible in a cup? I tested the whole range of flour density options starting with the USDA standard 125 g per cup (sifted) up to the maximum I could push into a leveled cup, 160 g per cup.

Recipes (should) always use sifted measurements when providing volumes of flour because of repeatability. If a recipe used unsifted flour, it would be nearly impossible to replicate the exact same quantity of flour using measuring cups because it’s impossible to tell how much the flour has settled. (See Kitchen Notes: Wheat Flour for more commentary on measuring flour.)

I can testify to that—back when I followed the recipe directly from the bag, I once tried making a half-batch and it was a mess. They came out completely wrong.

The linked article says, in the section on measuring, “Whenever possible, flour should be measured using a scale.” Since I learned that, I’ve made numerous half-batches with the flour scaled by weight, and they’ve come out perfectly every time.

So I wouldn’t even say you should measure flour by sifting it—you should weigh it. But, of course, that requires knowing what the correct weight is. Back in the recipe, Chu continues:

Unfortunately, in the case of this recipe, it was clearly not written with 125 g per cup in mind. After testing a whole range of flour measurements, it seems that 160 g per cup (or a total of 360 g) of flour was the intended quantity. For those of you who do not use kitchen scales and wish to dry measure this amount – it’s a little more than 2-³⁄₄ cup sifted flour.

Chu bases his conclusion that “360 g… of flour was the intended quantity” on, as far as I can tell, what he expects a chocolate chip cookie to be. He finds 280 grams of flour—roughly the weight of the prescribed 2+¹⁄₄ cups of flour if that flour has been sifted—to produce “thin and chewy” cookies that lack the body he expects, and finds his expectation fulfilled only at the upper end of the scale, 360 grams.

To be fair, his expectation is corroborated: Nestlé also make pre-made dough, in both break-and-bake and scoopable-tub forms, and the cookies so produced are more similar to what I’ve gotten from the 360-gram version of the recipe. An interpretation of Nestlé’s recipe that doesn’t get at least similar results to Nestlé’s pre-made dough rightly should be questioned.

At the same time… Nestlé employ professional bakers and recipe writers, don’t they? They should know full well that flour should be sifted when measuring by volume. Surely if they intended the recipe to use 360 grams of flour, but wanted to specify that in cups, they would have given a number of cups that equates to 360 grams of sifted flour?

For a long time I let that matter rest. Then I remembered something:

Nestlé didn’t create this recipe. They’re quite open about the fact that Ruth Wakefield, the proprietor of the real Toll House inn from whom they bought the recipe and the trademarks, created the original recipe back in the early 20th century.

So maybe there’s an earlier version of the recipe? What did Ruth Wakefield herself have to say about it?

It turns out there is. Nestlé themselves published it in a handout of some sort published in 1939, which is available today from Project Gutenberg, and Wakefield published it in her own cookbook titled “Toll House Tried and True Recipes”.

The Nestlé pamphlet version, from Project Gutenberg.

They sure did write recipes differently 90 years ago. Today, you always see ingredients and steps listed separately, but here they’re mixed together.

I dug this up a year ago, but only recently got around to actually making this version of the recipe (minus the nuts—I’ve never included them and I’m not starting now). I ended up largely following the same path as Max Miller, who covered it on Tasting History about a year before my own investigation, about two years ago now.

Here are the differences I observed between Wakefield’s original recipe and the more recent versions:

Flour: Sifted

We’ll start with the question I started out with, which Wakefield answers conclusively, in both the Nestlé pamphlet version as well as in her own cookbook: 2+¹⁄₄ cups flour, sifted.

Can’t get any clearer than that. Contrary to Chu’s inference, Wakefield did in fact intend for bakers to use sifted flour, which works out to 280 grams in Chu’s conversion.

The “thin and chewy” aspect that Chu found in his full-size cookies is resolved by another difference:

Drop size/recipe yield

The last step is “drop by half teaspoons”. Half-teaspoons?!?!

Wakefield’s recipe also says it “Makes 100 cookies”. That’s a lot!

The Nestlé version we’re all familiar with says to drop the dough by “rounded tablespoon”, and that their recipe “Makes about 5 dozen cookies”.

I normally use a 22.5-ml (1.5-tbsp) disher. I pack the dough into the bowl with a table knife and slice off the excess so every single cookie is pretty much exactly 22.5 ml worth of dough. With this, I get 24 cookies per half-batch (consistently, due to consistent measurements and my pack-and-slice dropping method). If I do a full batch, that’s 48 cookies, or 4 dozen.

So let’s work backwards from that and check the other recipes’ math:

22.5 ml × 48 = 1,080 ml of dough per full batch

Yeah, I can believe that the final volume of dough is a little over a liter. There is a little more dough than that left stuck to the mixer paddle, the mixer bowl, and the scoop and the knife. But as far as what goes into actual cookies, that’s close enough for some further napkin math.

Wakefield’s recipe says it makes 100 cookies. That works out to 10.8 ml (or so) of dough per cookie. Half a teaspoon is 2.5 ml, so this doesn’t add up—even a fully-rounded half-teaspoon would at most be 5 ml, and this is twice that. Inversely, if we divide 1,080 ml by level 2.5-ml scoops, that’d be more than 400 cookies! I don’t have any ideas on how to figure out whether her drop size or her yield estimate (or both) were wrong.

Nestlé’s version says it makes “about 5 dozen cookies”. 1,080 / 60 = 18 ml of dough per cookie. This is 4 teaspoons or 1+¹⁄₃ tablespoons—maybe “heaping tablespoon” is more accurate than their wording of “rounded tablespoon”.

I will say that half-teaspoons did produce some very cute mini-cookies, but it takes forever. I gave up on that quickly and switched to my 15-ml (1-tbsp) disher, two-thirds the size of what I normally use but six times the amount prescribed by Wakefield. I didn’t bother counting the cookies after that since they were different sizes.

L: Mini-cookies produced from 2.5 ml of dough each.
R: Somewhat more normal-sized cookies from 15 ml of dough each.

Applying the same math as above, if I started a new Wakefield batch and used my 15-ml disher for all of it, I should get 72 cookies.

If you try a drop size in that smaller range, whether it’s Wakefield’s 2.5 ml or the 15 ml I ended up using or anything in between, you’ll need to be aware that smaller cookies bake faster. That brings me to…

Baking time

This is not a difference in the recipe-as-written, but in the recipe-as-executed.

Nestlé’s bag says “9 to 11 minutes” at 375°F (190°C). Chu says basically the same: “ten minutes (give or take a minute depending on your oven)”. I always do 12. Wakefield says “10 to 12 minutes”.

Folks, I tried baking half-teaspoons of cookie dough for 10 minutes and they were this close to becoming cinders. They were still technically edible, but not very good and I would never serve them to another person.

Miller had the same finding. He went down to 8 minutes. I settled on 6 for the half-teaspoons, though I went back up to 8 when I switched to my 15-ml disher.

Whether I did 2.5 ml for 6 minutes or 15 ml for 8 minutes, the cookies came out thin and crunchy, not thin and chewy.

Baking sheet: Greased

The Nestlé recipe says to drop the tablespoonfuls “onto ungreased baking sheets”.

Chu doesn’t mention this instruction and instead says “I prefer to bake the cookies on either a silicone baking mat or on parchment paper”. I settled on a silicone mat, which slides around less than parchment paper does.

Wakefield says to drop the half-teaspoonfuls “on a greased cookie sheet”. Interesting!

I tried this—using the leftover butter on the inside of the wrapper, and forgoing the silicone mat—and I wasn’t impressed. They did release with some encouragement, but that ran into the crunchier cookies being easier to break. Finding no other noticeable difference, I went back to my silicone mats pretty quickly for the remainder of the batch.

Baking soda: Dissolve in hot water

That’s a new one on me. Wouldn’t this use up some of the fizz of the baking soda?

I did try it. If there was any significant difference one way or another in rise, it was swallowed by other factors. I don’t intend to try this step again.

Chocolate chips: Method

Back in the 1930s, Nestlé hadn’t yet introduced pre-made chocolate “morsels”. You had to buy a whole chocolate bar or two and chop it up yourself, into “pieces the size of a pea” as prescribed by Wakefield. The “morsels” came later, just after WW2 by Miller’s telling.

I do think Miller got this step wrong when he tried the recipe. Neither he nor I were interested in chopping up chocolate bars, so we both used pre-made chocolate chips, but he used full-size chocolate chips, then complained that this was too big to fit in his half-teaspoon.

I used mini chocolate chips and those fit my half-teaspoon fine. So that’s what I’d recommend if you try this recipe, especially if you try the half-teaspoon as written.

Chocolate chips: Quantity

The other difference on the chocolate chip front is the amount.

Every chocolate chip bag in the grocery store, unless it’s either a cheap dollar-store brand or a larger bulk package, contains 340 grams (12 ounces) of chocolate chips. The recipe on the bag generally calls for you to use one entire bag’s worth.

(The actual net weight in the bag can vary. I weighed out the contents of a Ghirardelli bag once and that came in a little under 340. Haven’t bought Ghirardelli chocolate chips ever since. Trader Joe’s consistently weigh in at 343 grams.)

The two “economy size” chocolate bars that Wakefield called for back in the 1930s were “7 ounces” (200 grams) each. She calls for two bars, so that’s 400 grams of chocolate—not 340.

This tracks with a problem I’ve been having: After using up the dough that contains the normal concentration of chocolate chips, I tend to have some dough left over at the end, enough for a few extra cookies, with few to no chocolate chips left. (Those cookies are basically butter cookies.)

Wakefield’s recipe offers an answer: The rest of the ingredients remain the same amounts, but those amounts were calibrated for 400 grams of chocolate chips, not 340. One bagful literally isn’t enough!

Last night, I made a half-batch of my normal chocolate chip cookies (based on Chu’s version of the recipe) but used 200 grams of chocolate chips instead of 170 grams. I still had a couple of butter cookies at the end, but fewer than previously. I feel like I could put even more chocolate chips in, honestly.

(A couple decades ago, I actually made a full batch with two whole bags of chocolate chips—so 680 grams—and I dimly remember that working fine, but that was before I was more precise about everything else and I haven’t attempted that again since.)

Eggs: Beaten whole

No other version that I’ve seen specifies to beat the egg(s) before adding to the mixer bowl, instead implying that one should basically crack the egg and dump the contents straight in, then let the mixer effectively beat the egg while incorporating into the dough.

In the half-batch that I did last night, I added this step. I think this made the dough less sticky somehow—the dough released from both the mixer paddle and my disher much more easily than I’m used to.

I’ll definitely be trying this again and paying attention to this aspect the next few times I make cookies.

What worked, what didn’t

First the parts that I’m not adopting:

• dissolving the baking soda in hot water: This seems pointless.
• half-teaspoons: Waaaay too much work. Maybe try this if you have two or three pairs of helping hands to share the labor. I don’t so I’ll just keep using my 22.5-ml disher.
• less flour than Chu thought: Nah. I like the fuller-bodied cookies from Chu’s interpretation. I’ll keep using 180 grams per half batch or 360 grams per full batch.

What I am adopting:

• more chocolate chips: At least 200 grams for a half batch or 400 grams for a full batch. I may try even more.
• beating the egg: If I’m right, this is helping the dough release easier, which is a tremendous win.

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