The best chocolate chip cookie recipe | Jeremy Snyder | TEDxAlbany

For years, Jeremy Snyder collected chocolate chip cookie recipes from chocolate chip bags, cookbooks, newspapers, magazines, recipe websites and blogs. As the recipes piled up, he wondered which one produces the best cookie. To answer this question, he and his family had a bake-off, serving 52 pounds of cookies to family and friends. Jeremy will discuss the favored recipes, how the chocolate chip cookie reflects American culture and how to engage children in science at home. When he's not baking cookies, Jeremy is a program manager in the field of energy efficiency and produces videos and multimedia at Science in a Nutshell Productions.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

So chocolate chip cookies
are my favorite food,

and over the years, I've collected
a lot of recipes for them,

and a bunch of them
claim to be perfect or the best,

and I knew they couldn't all be right.

So my family and I decided
to have a bake-off

in which we'd figure out which recipe
actually did make the best cookie.

I may be the one standing up here
talking to you today,

but my family and I
did this project together

from beginning to end.

The first step,
and the most subjective step,

for this whole project

was figuring out which cookies
we're going to bake from our collection.

And, of course, we had to include
the original Toll House cookie.

This was invented by Ruth Wakefield
back in the 1930s.

This is the recipe you find on the back
of the Nestlé chocolate chip bag.

And the story goes that she let them
publish her recipe on the bag

if they gave her
a lifetime supply of chocolate.

So I'm going to show you the pictures
of all the other cookies we baked,

and keep in mind that the same flower
is in each of the pictures

for relative scale.

(Laughter)

So we baked a couple from cookbooks.

This was from "BakeWise."

And this was "The Search
for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie."

Two from the cooking magazine
Cook's Illustrated.

Two from The New York Times.

And several from the internet,

including this copy
of the DoubleTree Hotel recipe,

this Neiman-Marcus rumor recipe

from Snopes,

the Savory Sweet Life blog recipe,

and this from the cooking website

allrecipes.com.

We also included a few from bakeries.

We used one from Bountiful Bread,
here in Albany, New York;

from the Placid Baker in Troy, New York;

and from Mrs. Fields,
from a mall in Connecticut.

And then we threw in
a few store-bought cookies:

Chips Ahoy!, Freihoffer's,

and that Nestlé premade dough
that you get in those yellow tubes.

So in the end,

we had over 50 pounds
of 17 different cookies,

and you notice that we labeled
each one with numbers,

and that was so when we had our friends
and family over for a tasting party,

it was a blind tasting.

And we asked everyone at the party

to rate each cookie
on a scale from one to ten

and then, also, let us know
which recipe they wanted

so they can try it at home.

When we looked at the results,

we found that the adults
liked very different cookies

than the children did.

This is the adult results.

The gold bars show
the average score for each cookie,

and the dark-brown bars

show the number of adults
who wanted to take home the recipe.

The red dots show which cookies

were from either bakeries
or were store bought.

You can see that they
are over on the right -

the lower-rated ones,

so people liked home-baked cookies.

The top-rated cookie,
over on the far left,

was from the cookbook "BakeWise,"

and the second highest one
was from Cook's Illustrated magazine.

So, as I was saying,
this is the top-rated recipe.

It's by Shirley Corriher,
in her cookbook "BakeWise."

And what was unique about this recipe
is that it called for roasting pecans,

and then you chop up the roasted pecans
and mix it in with the flour.

The second highest recipe -

and it was second highest
by just a whisker,

and it had the highest number
of people asking for the recipe -

was by Charles Kelsey,

and he's since left Cook's Illustrated

and opened his own sandwich restaurant
outside of Boston, called Cutty's,

and it's been getting phenomenal reviews.

There's a couple of unique things
about this recipe.

One is that you take the butter

and melt it and then brown it
on the stove top,

and the other thing

is that instead of creaming the sugar
with the butter, as in all other recipes,

you dissolve it in the liquids.

Now, if any of these foods
look good to you,

you already know about two sets
of chemical reactions

that create complex flavors in foods.

And I would propose to you

that the reason that
those two recipes ended up on top

was because they created complex flavors.

If you remember,

the "BakeWise" recipe
called for roasting the pecans,

and that roasting process will drive
what's called the "Maillard reaction."

The Maillard reaction

is a reaction between amino acids,
which make up proteins, and sugars

at high temperature.

And they result in the browning of foods

and also the formation
of hundreds of flavor compounds.

The other set of chemical reactions
is caramelization,

and that's the pyrolysis of sugar.

That means the decomposition of sugar

at high temperature
in the absence of oxygen.

Thank you.

So the Cook's Illustrated recipe
from Charles Kelsey

called for browning the butter,

and that browning process
also drives the Maillard reaction.

And he proposes

that the dissolving of the sugar
will drive the caramelization reaction.

The children liked a very different cookie

than the adults.

You can see on this chart

that the red dots mean the bakery
and store-bought cookies

are over on the far left.

This means if you'd like
to make children happy

with chocolate chip cookies,

you can save yourself a lot of time
by just buying them one.

(Laughter)

Now, the highest rated cookie here
was one that we did bake,

but this one had the lowest
baking temperature of all of them,

at 325 degrees Fahrenheit,

and that would minimize
the caramelization process.

So I think that what the story is here

is that children just prefer
a simpler, sweeter cookie.

(Laughter)

Now, if you'd like to make
a good chocolate chip cookie,

in addition to picking the best recipe,
there's some techniques that you can use.

Always bring your ingredients
to room temperature before you use them.

And that's because when you
are creaming the butter,

that will allow the butter
to trap more air bubbles inside.

If possible, use a recipe that will call
for mass of ingredients instead of volume

and measure the ingredients
on a kitchen scale.

I always tell my kids,

"When you're cooking,
it's okay to be creative,

but when you're baking,
you want to be precise

because that's chemistry
that you're doing."

One exception to that

is that it's okay to always throw in
an extra splash of vanilla extract.

(Laughter)

Be careful when you're measuring the salt.

We found from our tasting notes

that women especially were very sensitive
to the amount of salt in the cookies.

Try refrigerating your dough
for a day or two before you bake it.

Always preheat your oven very thoroughly,

and check the temperature
with an oven thermometer.

When you're baking, halfway through,

rotate the cookie sheets top to bottom
and spin them around.

And the most important thing
is always serve your cookies warm.

So my favorite part of this whole project
was getting to work with my kids,

Maia and Alby, who are here today.

This wasn't really a science project,

in the sense that we didn't really have
a negatable hypothesis

to prove or disprove,

but we got to practice
using some scientific techniques.

We talked about how to compare
the cookies as fairly as possible.

To do that, we needed to minimize
all the variations between them

except for the recipes themselves.

We figured out how to do the baking
and the tasting party very carefully,

and we had a set of procedures
for both of them.

For example,

when we had the tasting party,

we gave everyone a tasting sheet

that told them the exact order
to taste the cookies in,

and the order was random on each sheet.

That meant that when everyone
got to cookie #17,

it wasn't always last,

so people wouldn't be sick of eating
chocolate chip cookies by that point.

But I think the most important
message that they got

was that you can bring
critical thinking skills

to a problem that you can face
in everyday life, even at home.

I think that chocolate chip cookies
are a quintessential American food

and they reflect American culture
in a number of ways.

Just like America is said to be
the "melting pot of the world,"

chocolate chip cookie ingredients
come from all over the world.

The wheat used for the flour
and the poultry for the eggs

originated in the Fertile Crescent,

sugar originated in Southeast Asia,

and vanilla beans and cacao
are native to Central and South America.

The technique for making cookies
actually originated in Iran

and was formalized in Europe.

Just like with America,

the origin story of chocolate chip cookies
has some ambiguities to it.

No one doubts that Ruth Wakefield,

the owner and manager

of the Toll House Inn
in Whitman, Massachusetts,

was central to their creation

in the 1930s.

But we don't know exactly
how they were created.

One story goes is that she's making
her famous butter drop do cookies,

and they call for nuts.

She ran out of nuts,

so she chopped up a chocolate bar instead.

Another story says

that she usually used chocolate
in her cookies,

but it was baker's chocolate,
which would melt in the cookies.

And she ran out of baker's chocolate,
so she chopped up a chocolate bar instead,

which would stay solid
because it had a higher melting point.

And then another story,

which is told by the daughter
of the head chef of the Toll House Inn,

is that they were using
a large, commercial Hobart mixer

to mix up the dough,

and the vibrations from the mixer

vibrated off some chocolate bars
that were on a high shelf,

that fell into the dough,
and they broke up,

and they used them.

Whether we like it or not,

businesses have always been
and continue to be

an integral part of American culture,

and the chocolate chip cookie
wasn't invented at home.

The Toll House Inn
was a large, successful restaurant,

and people who ate there
included the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt,

Cole Porter, Joe DiMaggio -

a whole bunch of other people
you've heard of.

And the picture on the right
is the commercial kitchen

where chocolate chip cookies
were invented.

As a matter of fact, Ruth Wakefield
oversaw a large staff, including chefs,

so it's not even clear that she
would have been the hands-on inventor

of chocolate chip cookies.

Now, as much as businesses
are an integral part of American culture,

the character of these businesses
might have changed over time.

On the left is another shot
of the Toll House Inn

and a Thanksgiving dinner

that Ruth Wakefield served
to her guests on Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, that building
is no longer there.

And on the right is the Wendy's restaurant
that now stands in that place

and some of the food
that you can get there.

And next door to that is a Walgreens,
and across the street is a 7-Eleven.

Now, we as a nation are dealing
with some pretty weighty issues -

global climate change,

nuclear proliferation -

and it seems to me

that the national discussions
that we're having about these issues

always seem to focus on just escaping
from the negative consequences.

And if we have any goals at all,
they're very incremental.

Seems to me like the last time
we had a real big national goal

we were all working towards

may have been the Apollo moon shot.

So this a graph of the average score
of the 11 chocolate chip recipes

that we baked

versus the year
the recipes were published.

And you can see,

aside from Ruth Wakefield's
original recipe from the'30s,

there's a clear upward trend.

(Laughter)

And one interpretation
is that tastes change

and the more recent recipes
we just prefer.

But an interpretation that I like better

is that we're getting better
at making chocolate chip cookies,

and if you do a linear fit
through the data,

you can see we should get
to a perfect 10 cookie in the year 2040.

(Laughter)

And it might not be
the most lofty of national goals,

but it's a date
that I'm looking forward to.

(Laughter)

Thank you very much.

If anyone has a smartphone,

you can try to capture
the two recipes we talked about

with these QR codes.

So thank you.

(Applause)