Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book - Bruce Weinstein [0]
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough
From Chocolate
Melties to Whoopie Pies,
Chocolate Biscotti to Black
and Whites, with Dozens
of Chocolate Chip Cookies
and Hundreds More
To the members of the Stonewall Chorale in New York City. Hundreds of test batches later, you’re still first in the nation.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
On Baking Chocolate Cookies
Chocolate Cookies, A to Z
SOURCE GUIDE
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OTHER BOOKS BY BRUCE WEINSTEIN AND MARK SCARBROUGH
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
A MATCH MADE IN HOLLAND
Doing cooking demos and teaching classes around the country, we’ve learned one thing: no one ever tires of chocolate.
No wonder then that sometime during a demo at the International Chocolate Show in New York City, the idea hit us for an ultimate chocolate cookie book. We were making a particularly decadent treat: brownie turtle sundaes—brown sugar brownies, truffle ice cream, caramel sauce, and pecan bark. Somewhere between the brownies and the bark, we must have had the world’s first joint beatific moment—we already knew we wanted to write a cookie book, but why waste time on anything that wasn’t chocolate?
For a while after that, we lived in a kind of chocolate Paradise: bittersweet, semisweet, chips, melted, grated, chopped. We had chocolate chip cookies galore, macaroons and chocolate sandwich cookies, biscotti and chocolate tea biscuits, whole trays of them, cooling on the counters and the dining room table, then rather unceremoniously dumped into plastic bags and brought to friends all across New York City. Not once did anyone turn us down.
Chocolate and cookies. It’s a match so natural, so obvious, it’s hard to believe how modern it is. 1828, in fact. We can thank a Dutch chemist, Coenraad Johannes Van Houten, for almost every recipe in this book—not the recipes themselves, mind you, but the mere fact that they exist.
Before Van Houten, chocolate was almost exclusively a drink, hot or cold, express from the New World—not hot chocolate as we now know it, with warm milk; but a drink made with water, thick and bitter, like coffee, made by stirring the ground chocolate into hot water, and then drinking it without straining it. The Maya and Aztecs combined the fermented, ground chocolate beans with maize, spices, and water, then poured the concoction from a great height into smaller pots, thereby creating a muddy beverage with a viscous foam.
The conquistadors and other colonialists simply followed suit. After much ecclesiastical debate, Europeans developed a taste for this thick sludge (no maize for them, but other thickeners, like farina) and its heady foam (no pouring either—they beat the mixture with a small wooden whisk). However, they made one telling innovation. By the 1500s, sugar was a Western craze. So they sweetened the drink, now perfumed with everything from vanilla to musk(!), and drank to their hearts’ content. Chocolate was soon the beverage of choice in the Spanish court. Versailles was known to have a never-ending string of pots and chocolate service at all hours. And chocolate houses (the forerunners of coffeehouses) sprang up thick and fast in London’s central business district.
The royals and businessmen were quaffing a greasy, grainy mess. First, the chocolate they used didn’t dissolve; even powdered, it fell out of suspension and ended up at the bottom of the cup (again, like grounds in coffee). Second, chocolate naturally contains cocoa butter. This fat also didn’t hold in suspension; it rose to the top of the drink, making an oily slick in the foam. To make matters worse, the cocoa butter itself had often gone rancid from improper storage and unscrupulous additives. It wasn’t exactly savory fare. No wonder a stern, no-funny-business chemist from Holland was so interested in perfecting this prize from the New World.
Van Houten solved all these problems: fat, taste, and texture. He perfected a machine that could extract most of the cocoa butter from chocolate,