I’m back. That was a bit longer break than I planned.
Now that I have consistent temperature ingredients to start with using my Room Temperature Refrigerator the last temperature related issues for my Snickerdoodles was dough and oven temperature.
In the winter time as I mention my house is kept in the low 60’s (15-20 C) which works out quite nicely for most of my cookie recipes. The dough is easily scooped into a cookie scoop (Number #40 is the size I use most) and is easily released from the scoop. In the summer time though my house is in the higher 70’s (24-27 C) which especially for my Snickerdoodle recipe makes the dough a bit loose and harder to release from the cookie scoop. Cookie tends to spread a bit more when baked too.
To address this, I will toss the dough in the regular refrigerator for about 20 minutes to firm up the dough. Ideally, you would put the bowl back in the refrigerator in-between batches in the oven to keep the dough firm and take it out when ready to get another tray ready. But that adds a lot of time to the process. My solution is to put a cold pack like used for sports injuries under the bowl and if the room is warm one under the trays while they are waiting to go into the oven.
Place the cold pack in a bowl that is a little bit larger than the mixing bowl so that when you put the mixing bowl in it the cold pack wraps up the side some. To prevent freezing your dough store the cold pack in the refrigerator instead of the freezer.
If you have room in the refrigerator you can stage your prepared trays in there while waiting to go in oven.
Several sites discuss the benefit of “aging” cookie dough in the refrigerator and how it changes the taste and texture of the cookie. Here are two links that discuss the topic. In the future I’ll try it out to see the difference.
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2015/05/17/chilling-cookie-dough
https://www.thekitchn.com/refrigerated-cookie-dough-268281
The next temperature to control is the oven.
The temperature of ovens can vary widely from the overall temperature to spot temperatures within the oven. It is not unusual for an oven’s temperature not to match the temperature on the oven dial. And within the oven the temperature can vary widely from upper to lower rack and front to back on the same rack.
So, the first thing I did was to check that the overall temperature matched the oven dial setting. There are cheap oven temperature gauges you can get but I am skeptical that they measure accurately. So, I went for the best and also one that I can use for other tasks. The digital thermometers I have found to work the best are from Thermoworks. The thermometer I use is the Chef Alarm you will need to add the High Temp Air Probe.
These are the tests I performed on my oven.
Put racks on the upper middle and lower middle levels. Attach the grate clip to the upper rack in the middle left to right and front to back. Insert the air probe into grate rack and attach to Chef Alarm. Turn on Chef Alarm. Set oven to 375 F (190 C). Allow oven to stabilize. Compare temperature. If temperature is off check your oven manual to see if you can adjust the oven temperature reading. If not note how much the temperature is off and adjust accordingly when baking.
Repeat with grate clip on lower rack (don’t burn yourself, make sure to either use appropriate oven mitts or wait for oven to cool)
Repeat with grate clip in back of rack, front of rack, left of rack and right of rack.
To address the variation from top to bottom and front to back most recipes recommend switching trays from top to bottom and rotating the trays front to back. That means with cookies you are basically opening and closing the oven about every five minutes. Opening the oven gives a wide temperature swing and more than once I have knocked or tipped a tray messing up at least some of the cookie on that tray.
The difference between up and down can also be addressed by figuring out how much time each rack needs and time accordingly. So, we take one tray out early leaving the other to finish.
All of these steps require a lot of time keeping. Thermoworks has a great timer that I recommend for general time keeping but even with that there is a lot of times to track.
For most of my ovens in the houses I have lived the temperature front to back isn’t that significantly different so to avoid all the time keeping and switching of trays I baked one tray at a time. Takes longer but cookie process was easier to follow and resulted in good cookies. Less of a problem if you have double ovens.
one tray at a time lasted until I got to buy a new oven, it is a convection oven and now I can bake two trays at the same time with both trays going and coming out at the same time. There is a slight temperature difference between racks but not enough that anyone notices which rack a cookie was baked on. I’ll go into my convection oven in the future but for now if you are replacing your oven highly recommend getting a quality convection oven.
My routine for oven temperature is turn oven on at least 30 minutes before the first tray goes in. This gives the oven walls time to heat up and stabilize helping reduce swings in temperature. I’ll quickly put both trays into oven, kick off my timer and wait until the timer goes off. I avoid opening the oven if at all possible, using the door window and light to check things. Once I know how long a cookie takes, I rarely look.
When I take the cookies out, I don’t put new trays in just yet. I close the oven and start my cookie cooling timer (usually 2 minutes). When it goes off, I put the next set of trays in the oven. The cookie cooling period lets the oven get back to temperature. My theory is the act of taking trays out of the oven and putting new trays back in one event lets the oven temperature go way down. Letting the oven get back to temperature before putting in the new trays results in less of a temperature swing due to the door opening and closing.
At this point I was getting respectable cookies. The next things I worked on was improving the overall process to make it go smoothly. This involved equipment such as cookie trays/sheets, cooling racks, timer, measuring etc. I’ll cover that in the next articles.
