There are zillions of cookie recipes out there, but how do you make them taste "as good as homemade?" Here are some tips that will make every recipe taste better.
Instructions
1. For best flavor and texture, use a good-quality butter rather than margarine, vegetable shortening, or lard.
DON'T use reduced-fat margarine -- manufacturers reduce the fat by replacing it with water, which gives cookies a cake-like texture instead of the crispy crunchy flaky texture of your grandma's cookies.
And avoid cheap butter -- the cheaper the butter, the higher the water content. Again, you'll end up with little cakes instead of cookies.
2. If you use salted butter, you may not need to add the salt the cookie recipe calls for.
3. Make sure the baking soda or baking powder is well broken up before you add it to the mixing bowl -- soda "flavor bursts" spoil the effect of homemade cookies!
4. Go ahead, double the vanilla. You know you want to ...
Just be aware that if you want the butter flavor to knock your socks off, a little extra vanilla will enhance the butter flavor but too much vanilla will mask it.
The same is true when combining vanilla with other delicate flavors. Last time I used pistachios in cookies I regretted adding too much vanilla. Mind you, "too much" in this case was about four times what the recipe called for, but you get my point: If the raison d'etre of the cookie is pistachio, it's a disappointment to taste only vanilla.
5. Many baking spices have volatile ingredients. For the liveliest flavor, buy and use them promptly rather than keeping them around the house. This is much easier and cheaper now that many grocery stores offer bulk spices.
6. Experiment with nut varieties. For example, hazelnuts with milk or semi-sweet chocolate is a match made in heaven.
7. Good-quality chocolate chips make a huge difference! Don't stint on the quality of your most important flavor ingredients.
8. Insulated cookie sheets are a life-saver! Cookies bake more evenly, and the even baking gives you a longer time period to pull the cookies out of the oven "perfectly baked."
9. You can use foil instead of greasing the cookie sheet -- spatulas work well on the foil and cleanup is far easier. And, if you butter the foil, you get the added flavor of the butter with the easy cleanup of foil.
10. Using a small ice cream scoop to put cookie batter on the sheets speeds things up and gives rounder, more uniformly sized cookies.
11. Cookies are done baking when they're no longer glossy, or when tiny (about a half millimeter) holes open up all the way across the top of the cookie. If you like your cookies more caramelized, you can leave them in the oven a couple minutes longer than this bubble-break stage.
12. Cooling racks let your cookies release more steam than if you put them on paper towels or paper bags, so they'll keep their crispy crunchy texture longer.
13. If your cookies aren't all eaten by bedtime, store them in an airtight container.
Tags: your cookies, butter flavor, crispy crunchy, much vanilla, rather than