Stop the Madness: Soft Cookies

Stop the Madness: Soft Cookies

It has come to my attention that in some quarters it’s considered acceptable to prepare cookies that are not crisp but rather “soft.”



This appalling practice was recently brought home to me when my youngest daughter – an otherwise flawless example of humanity – prepared a batch of chocolate chip cookies with no crisp crunch because, she claimed with flawed logic, “people like them.”

I can’t imagine to what people she may have been referring. Sane people? How could that be? People I know? I pray no.

Who in the world could ever prefer a cookie that was not crisp, that had no crunch? The very character of a cookie is defined by crisp crunch, and the words themselves are undeniably positive. All the best foods -- fried chicken, French fries, celery – are crisp and go crunch when you bite into them. All the worst foods – kidneys, chitterlings, rotten apples – are soft and squishy.

People may say this is a matter of taste, an individual preference. I prefer to take the 1,000 foot view…no, the 1,000 light year view. Let’s say you’re visiting Venus and you run into me, a friendly Venusian. You want to impress me with the best Earth has to offer, and so perhaps forestall the conquest of your weak Earthling culture with my superior Venusian technology. Would you hold out to my squiggling tentacles a soft cookie?! Good lord, do you wish to spark intergalactic warfare? A crisp, crunchy cookie is for sure what you’d offer the extraterrestrial me...because you wish to impress me so that you and your decadent race may continue to live another millennium.

Or come back down to earth and consider this: under-baked soft cookies are a threat to our health. It’s been confirmed that in addition to e coli, un-cooked cookie dough may present the threat of salmonella a potentially deadly bacterium. Soft cookies, cookies that are not subjected to the right amount of heat, can kill you, or worse yet, me.

Some will say this tearful plea for crisp, crunchy cookies – as opposed to limp, flaccid cookies – is Quixotic, others, perhaps, a sure sign of the lunacy the weak-minded doctors about me continually diagnose. But I say this: if my humble plea prevents a war of the worlds that could kill billions, or even the death of one child, it would have been, more or less, worth it.

So please, crisp your cookies. It’s how they were intended. It’s the right thing to do.

Au Contraire, David. The very best cookie recipe in my arsenal is the Cooks Illustrated Thick and Chewy cookie. It is far superior to any other version of the Tollhouse cookie that I have ever eaten or prepared. Now..I'm not sure that I would call this a "soft" cookie and I admit that soft cookies for me conjure up the horror of those "soft n chewy" cookies one can find in a grocery store cookie aisle (truly abominations) but I find the chewy texture much more satisfying than a thin, shatteringly crisp cookie. My victims (or rather, coworkers) who gobble up all my delightful baked goods for me so that I can have the one or two I'm allowed beg me to make these cookies -- they think they're the best too.

Although...any port in a storm, friends.

Those cooks illustrated thick & chewy cookies are outstanding. I'm not a big fan of crisp chocolate chip cookies, though.

I'm with David. Crisp is the way to go with cookies. Rich, buttery, and crisp. Yum.

Mr Hammond-
I would happily come relieve you of any soft chocolate chip, or soft oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that you need to dispose of.

Happily.

This offer is extended to any future disposal needs as well.

Did I mention happily?

I'll accept a chewy middle, but if the edges are also not crispy, I'm spitting 'em out. I find myself always debating this topic with friends . . . but unlike Congress, I'm open to a reasonable compromise.

Sorry, David... when it comes to Chocolate Chip, I'm in the soft camp. Even a touch underdone. If somebody could master a lightly crisp edge with a soft center, I'd change my tune. But all the chocolate chip cookies I've had have been either/or. Soft and chewy throughout, or hard and crunchy.

Dmnkly wrote:Even a touch underdone.

Keep a doctor close at hand when undertaking high-risk amusements.

David,

How do you prefer your brownies? I can easily bet you like the crisp edges? How do you feel about crisp edges and fudgie (soft) centers?

Regards,

C2, are those trick questions? I like crispy, crunchy cookies. Anything else is a variety of cake (which includes brownies).

David Hammond wrote:

Dmnkly wrote:Even a touch underdone.

Keep a doctor close at hand when undertaking high-risk amusements.

If I'm going to start eliminating risky eating habits, I doubt slightly underdone chocolate chip cookies is going to crack the top 50, falling somewhere in between, "Eh, it only expired a week ago" and "This supermarket fish counter guy probably knows what he's doing, right?"

(Also, seeing as I'm married to one, here's hoping I always have a doctor close at hand!)

With all the raw cookie dough I have eaten in my lifetime, I should be dead by now.

David Hammond wrote:All the best foods -- fried chicken, French fries, celery – are crisp and go crunch when you bite into them. All the worst foods – kidneys, chitterlings, rotten apples – are soft and squishy.

Ah, so YOU'RE that one person in the world who hates ice cream!

Perhaps we're using "crisp" where we ought be using something subtler, like "crumbly" to describe the not-soft ideal? I don't believe I've ever had a "shatteringly crisp" cookie, and don't believe I want to. But I do think they should be toothsome, put up a bit of resistance, and break into pieces rather than bend or stretch like raw dough---or chewing gum. The crumbliness provides textural contrast with the smoothness of the chips. If the whole thing is soft, you've got a fairly one-note affair.
I would only add that I do accept a short time window of softness (about 10 min.) after they are removed from the oven. After that, nature herself produces a natural crumbliness as the cookies cool that should not be interfered with. IMHO.

mrbarolo wrote:Perhaps we're using "crisp" where we ought be using something subtler, like "crumbly" to describe the not-soft ideal? I don't believe I've ever had a "shatteringly crisp" cookie, and don't believe I want to.

Cookies must crunch, lest they be cakes.

Blown Z wrote:With all the raw cookie dough I have eaten in my lifetime, I should be dead by now.

When we used to make cookies at college, we laughed at the number of cookies the recipe said we'd have. We were lucky to get half the predicted number of cookies, as so much of the dough was gone before it ever saw an oven. Of course, that was a long time ago, so maybe eggs were safer.

David Hammond wrote:

mrbarolo wrote:Perhaps we're using "crisp" where we ought be using something subtler, like "crumbly" to describe the not-soft ideal? I don't believe I've ever had a "shatteringly crisp" cookie, and don't believe I want to.

Cookies must crunch, lest they be cakes.

So, did you like Pepperidge Farm "Bordeaux" cookies? They were my favorite packaged cookies. Very crunchy.

Mr. Provocateur, I look forward to your next threads, "Air - It's Overrated" and "Pillows - What's With All the Softness."

I can at least highly recommend Tate's Bake Shop for your chocolate chip cookie needs. Nobody does burnt sugar lattice with elemental globules of demoisturized butter oil and Jurassic fossil dry chocolate husk chips clinging to dessicated wheat cinders better, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

My sister-in-law in Colorado suggested a possible motivation for an inexcusable practice:

"While children are impatiently waiting for cookies to bake the inevitably stick their finger in the batter to have a taste, this taste is so good that they do it a second time, and then a third time. At some point they are caught and warned that they could get salmonella or worms if they eat raw batter. This knowledge really spoils the whole experience. When they grow up they soft bake their cookies to satisfy their inner child."

No, it's because I like the hybrid crisp-soft aspect of a cookie. I like the butter-coated crumbs, the chocolate chips that still have just enough shape to bite through but are soft enough to coat your mouth with cocoa butter when they crack open, and the combination of slightly crisp outer cookie and soft, chewy inner cookie.

If you bake a chocolate chip cookie until it's crispy throughout, you miss out on all that. If you eat raw cookie dough, you miss out on all that. Just call me goldilocks.

I'm completely with Ed F on this one. There must be some crisp on the edge, some softness in the middle.

David, you so crazy! When I get worried about salmonella and e coli and whatnot, it's going to be beefsteak tartare finished with a raw egg that's going to be the first to go from my diet.

When it comes to chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin, it's soft cookies all the way. Maybe it's a generation gap, but most folks I know like those cookies soft. Or crunchy-soft at most. Or still warm, from the oven, with a dollop of vanilla ice cream if I'm feeling decadent.

Cookies must crunch, lest they be cakes.

Again with the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Things need not "crunch" simply to be not cake. Cake is soft and moist. There's a whole lotta spectrum on the other side of cake before you get all the way to crunch.

When I think of "crunch" I think of a potato chip, a Dorito, corn flakes. But not necessarily a chocolate chip cookie.

For a cookie perhaps we need a new word (or a better thesaurus) but I think of something gentler, not as loud, not as splintery as these crunches. Yet something not as moist as brownie or cake; something that will break into pieces if dropped. But not quite "crunch" as described above.

I call it crumbly, but apparently that's unpersuasive.

Note: I like the Bordeaux cookie well enough, but it's not a choc. chip cookie. I would never want my choc. chip cookie to have the Bordeaux texture.

Fully agreed. But if it's a cookie, it has to crunch.

I agree on crisp cookies provided they are not stale. Except for madelines. They should be soft. But please do not eat any more bugs!!

I gotta stand up for the soft cookies here. A nice, warm. rich and soft choc chip cookie (or and a glass of ice cold whole milk is a joy indeed. A bit of crispness around the edges is perfectly fine and indeed to be desired, but it's the soft and melted chips inside that make it.

That said, I used to like Matt's choc chip cookies but something about them has changed in the last ten years or so. The gummy texture and the overt vanillin flavor are now off putting to me.

Hammond,

I am 100% with you on the soft cookie front - give me a lacy, brittle, redolent of caramelized chocolate and brown butter cookie over a faux-bread pudding texture, pseudo-cake any day.

But I disagree with you here:

David Hammond wrote:All the best foods -- fried chicken, French fries, celery – are crisp and go crunch when you bite into them. All the worst foods – kidneys, chitterlings, rotten apples – are soft and squishy.

Kidneys are not mushy. I ate more kidneys this week than I ever hope to repeat. They are snappy, poppy, almost grape-like (exploding uric acid in your mouth - yum!), in the nastiest way imaginable. One of the worst foods? Most certainly. Mushy, definitely not.

Habibi wrote:I ate more kidneys this week than I ever hope to repeat. They are snappy, poppy, almost grape-like (exploding uric acid in your mouth - yum!), in the nastiest way imaginable.

Tell us more.

I apparently am one of the "insane" and like soft and chewy cookies. I may even prefer them. I agree that oatmeal and chocolate chip are best soft, and I add peanut butter to that list. I love those Heinemann's mini soft chocolate chip cookies and could easily eat the whole box. I've been known to leave Oreos for months until they're stale, which makes them soft and chewy.

However, I prefer shortbread/butter/sugar cookies to be crisp, browned on the edges, that melt in your mouth shortly after biting into it. I miss Entenmann's dark chocolate chip cookies that were perfect to dunk in milk. The other day, I picked up quite a few cookies from Fresh Farms that were all crispy and are really something. As soon as I remember the names, I'll post them here. I especially like crunchy cookies that are coated in chocolate—chewy, chocolate-coated cookies sound less appealing. Saturday I stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some cookies from the "buffet"—Key Lime Shortbread was the standout. Buttery, rich, tangy, beautiful, and quite crisp. I guess it all depends on the type of cookie, but soft sometimes is better than crisp.

David Hammond wrote:Cookies must crunch, lest they be cakes.

But "cookie" comes from the Dutch koekje which means little cake.

But I forgive you, because finally I have an ally:

David Hammond wrote:Anything else is a variety of cake (which includes brownies).

It really irks me when people classify brownies as cookies. They have the crumb of cake, they're baked in a pan, they're sliced after baking and sometimes (though unnecessarily) frosted and decorated...calling them cookies makes as much sense as calling cake with custard filling Boston Cream Pie.

How do you feel about macarons, which are crispy and chewy?

I realize I mentioned a lot of prefab cookies, but I don't know a bakery that has some really notable cookies to try. Too many places specialize in those spritz types that are all the freakin' same except some have sprinkles, some have the glacé cherry, some are dipped...zzzzz

PL, I think we (and I include justjoan in this group) may want to make a further distinction between cookies and bars. Bars are not supposed to crunch; it'd be weird if they did; they are clearly a kind of firmer cake.

About the derivation of the word "cookie," well, languages evolve, and if you order a tortilla in Spain it will be way different than the tortilla you get in Mexico.

About Madeleines and macaroons, it seems odd to call them (especially the former) "cookies," but people call all kinds of odd things "cookies."