Why Dorie Greenspan’s Caramel Crunch Chunklet Cookies are Genius

Each week in Genius Recipes—usually along with your assist!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that can change the best way you cook dinner.

Prolific doesn’t start to cowl Dorie Greenspan’s profession. Within the final 20 years, she’s written 14 cookbooks, a newspaper column, numerous articles, and been in movies. In her newest cookbook Baking with Dorie, Ms. Greenspan has give you one more option to reinvent the chocolate chip cookie, taking it from conventional to terrific with one easy however efficient baking tip.

First make the dough, which she suggests doing with a mixer but additionally works simply superb achieved by hand. Subsequent the dough will get wrapped and chilled. No surprises right here. However then these seemingly humble cookies are sliced and baked not on a baking sheet however in a typical muffin tin. “As a result of these slice-and-bake cookies are baked in muffin tins till their backside and sides are deeply golden, the butter and sugar brown so utterly that they produce the complete, nutty, edgily candy taste of caramel,” Dorie explains. That great caramel taste is the primary to hit your tongue if you take a chunk. It’s so excellent that she named the cookies Caramel Crunch-Chocolate Chunklet Cookies despite the fact that there isn’t any caramel within the ingredient listing.

The magic of those cookies might be defined by science. Heating sugar breaks it down into glucose and fructose. These molecules then break down additional and react with each other creating new taste compounds, like phenols and esters. Due to these new compounds cooked sugar and butter turn into a lot greater than merely candy. They meld collectively and remodel into one thing buttery, bitter, malty, and nutty all of sudden.

As if that weren’t sufficient, these cookies have much more particular traits. Initially, Dorie makes them with each granulated sugar and confectioners’ sugar. Whereas the granulated sugar is doing its job of holding the cookies moist and candy, the confectioners’ sugar provides tenderness giving them the feel of a mushy and chewy shortbread.

Dorie additionally suggests that you simply use chopped chocolate as an alternative of chips. Whereas chips keep complete in baked cookies, chopped chocolate introduces items of various sizes which are properly distributed all through the cookie. Every cookie has a great deal of chocolate, from tiny flecks to good, massive swimming pools, giving each chunk a extra advanced taste. The muffin tin additionally retains all of the cookies the very same form and measurement in order that they cook dinner evenly and look unbelievable. What extra might you ask for? This Dorie Greenspan fan (or “Greenstan” if you’ll) is 100% glad.