Nigella Lawson shares her recipe for delicious chocolate chip cookies (2024)

FAQs

Who traded her famous cookie recipe to the Nestlé Corporation? ›

Ruth Graves Wakefield, the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, traded her secret recipe to Nestle in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate.

Using butter in cookies

“You can mechanically shove air into it by creaming. Warm butter is not able to hold onto it, so you're going to get a denser dough.” When using warmer or melted butter, cookies will struggle to lift and lighten, resulting in a cakier texture, like brownies.

As the butter melts, the cookie's structure loosens, so that the water in the dough is able to combine with the baking soda, dissolving it. The baking soda then reacts to the acidic components present in brown sugar, creating gases that cause the cookie to rise.

1. Granulated sugar. Using granulated white sugar will result in a flatter, crispier and lighter-colored cookie. Granulated sugar is hygroscopic, so it attracts and absorbs the liquid in the dough.

A Deal Is Struck with Nestlé

On March 20, 1939, Ruth Wakefield signed an agreement with Nestlé that gave the company the right to use her chocolate chip cookie recipe and the Toll House brand. Reports indicate that Ruth Wakefield received one dollar as part of the deal.

In 1939, Wakefield sold Nestlé the rights to reproduce her recipe on its packages (supposedly for only $1) and was hired to consult on recipes for the company, which was said to have provided her free chocolate for life.

It all makes a difference. Our control cookie, as with most cookies, uses softened butter, and this recipe tends to be a bit cakier. A cookie made with the same amount of melted butter will give you a fudgier, chewier cookie. It helps it spread out more and gives you some nice divots to catch more chocolate.

But one unexpected error bakers can make is adding too much of a good thing, butter. Although butter generally makes it all better, bakers who go overboard with it are dooming their cookies to a greasy and crumbly texture.

Baking powder: Baking powder can be used to replace baking soda, though not at a 1-to-1 ratio. Because the former is not as strong as the latter, it's important to use three times the amount of baking powder as baking soda. Be aware, a slightly bitter, off-putting taste might result from using that much baking powder.

Baking soda is good indefinitely past its best by date, although it can lose potency over time. You can use a rule of thumb—two years for an unopened package and six months for an opened package. While old baking soda may not produce as much leavening action, it is still safe to eat.

What is the best brown sugar for cookies? ›

Using all light brown sugar will yield cookies with a lighter flavor (that's not a bad thing!). They'll be buttery with accents of vanilla and a soft interior, but a lighter molasses flavor. Opting for all dark brown sugar will give you a richer flavor and ever-so-slightly softer centers.

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

Cream of tartar makes cookies chewy, as it precludes the sugar in the dough from crystalizing, which would lead to crispiness (ie: the opposite of chewiness).

Wallace "Wally" Amos, Jr.

He is the founder of the Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookie, the Cookie Kahuna, and Aunt Della's Cookies gourmet cookie brands, and he was the host of the adult reading program, Learn to Read.

It all started back in 1939. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the successful Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, was mixing a batch of cookies when she decided to add broken pieces of Nestlé Semi-Sweet chocolate into the recipe expecting the chocolate to melt.

Sometime in the 1930s Wakefield came up with the recipe for chocolate chip cookies. She chopped a Nestlé semisweet chocolate bar into small pieces and dropped them into a cookie batter. The chocolate remained in chunks and did not melt. She called it the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.