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- Hi, I'm Jerry James Stone, and in today's video,
I'm gonna show you how to troubleshoot making cookies,
thanks to my friends over at Mother Nature Network.
We're gonna walk you through exactly what happens,
what happens when you add too much baking soda
or if you use baking powder instead,
or too much flour, or if you melt the butter.
All of these things are common,
everyone makes these mistakes, so don't be too frustrated.
And hey, you know what, honestly, I'll tell ya,
some people like some of these things.
Some people actually prefer melted butter for their cookies
because it's actually crisper and caramelized.
So you know, maybe that's what you want.
But at least you'll know how to recognize these things
and how to fix them, so let's get to it.
The first thing that we're gonna do is
we're gonna use the control recipe, which is that basic,
Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe
that everyone loves, everyone has had.
Now, I'm gonna do a fraction of that,
because you know, food waste,
we're making five different cookie recipes today,
and they're not all cookies that I want to eat,
so I won't be using the exact measurements
that you're used to seeing if you've made that recipe a lot,
but they're all in line,
so we're gonna use that as the control recipe.
Then we're gonna do a recipe where we replace
the baking soda with the baking powder,
and guess what happens?
It gets really cakey, so that's what we're gonna do second.
The third version that we're gonna do
actually uses way too much flour for any cookie recipe,
but just so you get to see exactly what that looks like.
Fourthly, that melted butter that I was talking about.
The melted butter is, for some people they actually love it.
It's just a personal preference,
but you'll get to see what that melted butter
does to the recipe versus actually just softened butter.
And lastly, we're gonna replace the sugar,
the brown sugar, and use all white sugar,
and you can see what that looks like too.
So let's get to making it!
So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take
our softened butter, and we're gonna cream it
with the white sugar and the brown sugar.
And this is a really important step.
You want that butter to be room temperature,
add the sugar and the butter to your stand mixer,
and beat it on like the highest speed for a couple minutes.
Then we're gonna add in our egg yolks
and our vanilla extract.
And that's really important,
getting all those wet ingredients together.
Lastly, we add in, guess what?
Our flour, so we have our flour and our baking soda.
Those two ingredients are then mixed in.
And then some chocolate chips.
So that's our control recipe.
Now we're gonna look at what happens when you add
baking powder instead of baking soda, or too much flour,
or melted butter, or all white sugar.
So here's a quick look at those doughs, when they're made.
Now, if you look at the control recipe,
if you look at the one with baking powder instead
of baking soda, you can see that that dough is really wet.
And the reason for that is baking powder
reacts immediately with the moisture.
The dough next to it is the one with too much flour.
And that, as you can tell, it just looks like like a lump,
like a rock, and guess what?
The cookies come out the same darn way.
Next we have the dough with the melted butter.
And this one probably has the most visual difference
compared to the control recipe.
It's a really, really dark brown,
and that's that melted butter along with the brown sugar.
Everything just looks caramelized.
And last but not least, the all white sugar.
Now this one compared to the control recipe,
as you can tell, this dough is all white.
There's no brown sugar at all, and it definitely shows.
Okay, let's bake some cookies.
So what happens when you start replacing these ingredients?
Well for one, when you replace
the baking soda with baking powder,
because baking powder actually is its own acidic reaction,
it just keeps expanding, it makes the cookie cakier
than the original Nestle Tollhouse recipe.
Whereas too much flour, makes it a lot tougher.
These things are complete, rock hard biscuits.
Not appetizing by any means.
The melted butter is actually quite nice.
The melted butter, which can make your recipe greasy
if you use too much, but if you use the right amount,
can actually make the cookie crispy
and nicely caramelized, it's actually not a bad flavor.
And if you like crispier cookies versus the chewier cookie,
you might want to consider melted butter as an option.
The last thing we have is the white sugar,
which these cookies compared to all the other ones,
are significantly whiter.
They're not as caramelized,
the brown sugar in there is not in there.
The white cookies don't rise
and get as chewy or light and airy,
because that brown sugar is an acid,
and that's reacting with the baking soda.
By leaving the brown sugar out,
you get a flatter, denser cookie.
So that's what it looks like
when you make all those changes to a cookie.
But there's a lot more that goes into these things
than just baking soda, flour, sugar, and butter.
In fact, all of the ingredients have the opportunity
to make things go wrong, which is why
you should check out the link in the show notes.
MNN has this amazing ultimate cookie troubleshooting guide,
which will walk you through the whole process.
No mistakes, no worries, I promise.
And if you're looking for other baking tips
or just other delicious recipes, be sure to visit MNN.com.
Thanks for joining me today, enjoy!
- [Narrator] This video's been brought to you by
Mother Nature Network.
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