Sixth Street-Style Chocolate Chip Cookie (Part 2) the PoP Baking Club

Welcome to the inaugural po baking club Sunday follow-up class to Wednesday's lecture and demo this is the first week that I'm doing this so I'm learning a lot I am very excited about the prospect of doing a baking club the PO is the practice of pastry and I am uh Kathleen minger my first name is Mary but I am sharing what I know about baking I am a certified executive pastry chef I work out of my home now I used to teach to The college level I ran my own businesses cake decorating I've owned a

restaurant I've invented cake decorating tools I've done a lot but mostly I was self-taught for a good 15 years until I went back to school in my early 40s and my whole trajectory and career changed and I taught at the college level for over 12 years so right now real quick I'm going to interrupt my talking and I'm going to pull a frozen cookie from my residential freezer I have a propane Oven and a residential freezer and I'm going to pull it out because I want to slack my cookies so I'm going to be baking

cookies while we talk I have this rack from Ikea that rolls it's very convenient I've already baked three cookies and I'm getting ready to bake we'll do a fourth and a fifth but what you should know is while I work I take notes and that's what these are these are notes that tell me the time and temperature how long they slacked um Anything that I need to know because one once I come to my favorite cookie that's the winner and that's the one that I'm going to follow so what I encourage you to do while

you're listening to me is not think about what you think you know about a chocolate chip cookie but think about ingredient function so it's one thing to grab a recipe off the internet and then make it and not think about it but I kind of don't give you all the answers I'm going to be asking you to Make connections to what you're doing because I know this is an international group and you know Dairy is very different in other countries and around the world flour is very different our ingredients are very different so you're going

to have to think about what's going on in your home because I will never ever have a definitive answer for whatever is going on in your kitchen I'm going to write down the time I'm just going to call it noon I'm going to slack The cookie I preheated my oven and I have an oven thermometer in there that is because my oven is not dialed in I you know you can set it to 350 and it's like 365 so I have my oven set to 325 and I will go check what temperature it is using

the oven thermometer it's right about 32025 which is where I want it so then I'm going to go to my freezer I have a small freezer in the other room really small but it's like stays colder so this One does not and I get like a lot of frost so I have three different versions of this chocolate chip cookie I made this week okay this one just stayed on a tray WRA this one is the one we're going to bake out of of so these are smaller this is the blue scoop which I'll show you

and these are the green Scoops so we're going to work off of these cookies off the green scoop I can already tell they're not frozen super hard in a commercial kitchen your cookies get Frozen really really hard my recommendation is that you take notes this is meant to be just like if you were in a pastry school or in a class people stand they sit they listen they take notes and then you ask questions so I'm going to tell you how I bake it and then you're going to be thinking how can I apply this

to my home kitchen and what I do I am using these little cute quarter sheet trays I like to buy half sheet trays it's what I use but when I Make one cookie at a time if you think about it if you made your dough this week and you scooped it out I have 1 2 3 four I can just bake one at a time if it doesn't work out it's okay I can do another one and I can keep testing the bake so if you're having trouble dialing in your oven that's the really nice

thing about having Frozen cookies because you can go one at a time so I'm just using a small little quarter sheet tray but I'm using two so there's two Sheet pans and I'm going to layer them from the beginning and I'm using a s pad layering any kind of pan like this that creates air between is going to give you an insulated property insulation means the heat's not going to go through as quickly you're going to slow it down this also Sil pad is going to slow down the heat transfer this is a real Sil

pad it has fiberglass inside fiberglass actually helps conduct the heat if you just have a silicone baking mat with no Fiberglass you might get a different baking result and that's one of those things like I said I can't control in your kitchen now the reason that I want to insulate insulate versus just having one and like a parchment which is going to give me a crunchier crisper more um high heat conduction is because this is frozen so I'm going to take one of these guys I'm going to put the rest back in the freezer and

I like when they have like edges like that when I've scooped Them kind of like that so that's going to go here okay and then I'm going to put it here with the note that goes with it and it's going to slack for a minimum of 15 minutes and anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes is going to give me an exterior that's soft while the inside's still frozen so when I start to bake it it's going to melt but that inside's going to stay thick then I'm going to lower the temperature of the oven and

then I'm going to bake it to color That's how I'm going to get a nice thick Center so I'll put these back in the freezer I like to use kosher salt I'm going to go ahead and um sprinkle a little bit on right now because I like it to soak in a little or not soak in but evaporate a little bit so I'm going to look at my clock it's 12:07 at [Music] around I'd say 12:20 I'll stick it in the oven so my oven's just on I've never thought to double up the pans that's

Genius first of all thank you but I have not invented anything that I share with you I have been to a couple different pastry schools and I incessantly read books that are firsthand primary resources so I am always getting the solid information when you think about heat transfer you can begin to dial in everything that you bake and you're no longer beholden to the kind of pan they sell you at William Sonoma that you only have one kind of pan and you don't know Why you know maybe you have a Pyrex versus a metal pant

you can start you can start to understand do you use the diamond for the recipe too uh no actually so that's a great question because that'll lead us into the recipe the recipe is on the link tree and it's at the top of the link tree for the pop baking clubs a lot of people are confused by this and the thing is is over time the more you use it the less confusing it will get the ingredients in This recipe are butter sucrose which is table sugar brown sugar a flour baking soda sea salt eggs

yolks and chocolate chips I use sea salt I I use that blue can that's at a lot of grocery stores is like balans and I use the fine kosher salt would be fine and you can totally use it it dissolves really nicely into a cookie dough I just happen to use the sea salt Florida cell you can use any any decorative or um finishing salt on this Cookie I could have used my daughter went to Iceland last year and brought me back smoked sea salt that's got a really rough grain that'd be beautiful you can

use kosher as a thick grain you can use whatever you want and you can add the amount that you want the difference is going to be in texture and so quite frankly Malden maybe I'll put Malden on the next one the Malden salt will give me a nice crunch on the top Malden's just more expensive I've been seeing a Lot of people online throwing Malden into their baking like in the bowl and I don't recommend that it's too expensive and it's not the right grain so there are finishing salt which are more money and then

there are other salts that you're looking at like how fast do they dissolve someone said are we supposed to use salted or unsalted butter if you follow me if you worked in my kitchen or if you're one of my students when I taught I only had unsalted butter in the Kitchen number one reason was to prevent confusion because you can always add salt to anything if you're doing baking and culinary but if somebody accidentally and when you have a lot of lot going on a lot of people in a kitchen if you can limit mistakes

one way to do it is by having unsalted butter I also do it because I don't have the time because I switch Brands a lot to find out who how much what percentage of salt is in everything because you can Use salted butter for some baking I just don't like to make things complicated so I just do the unsalted but that's a great question okay tips on making sure your measurements stay accurate when transferring wet ingredients from Deli cups that's a great question and quite frankly I get anxious about that sort of thing uh scrape

scrape just be really careful and scrape scrape you can make yourself anxious and and worried about it but I I think the bottom line is the Person who developed the recipe knows that's going on and their final result was because they were scraping so we're all scraping so it kind of works out I wouldn't worry too much about it the recipe is on my link tree you're going to go by where this this column in the center is 100% what I do when I have a recipe that I put into this spreadsheet I can change

this percentage from 100% to 200% and it doubles it for me or I can cut it in half and this is in grams Which means you can scale this recipe up and down this is actually a relatively small batch because a 4 and a half quart mixer is kind of small and that's what I have have your ingredients in sections so these are the ones that cream together these are the dries that get sifted together and these are the eggs and then the chocolate chips and add-ins are always at the bottom it'll tell you the

baker's percentage this one's rounded and then this one's to the Hundreds this is convenient if you love this recipe and you own a coffee shop or anything and you want to use it because this chocolate chip cookie recipe came to me from some very good chefs and it's been used in bakeries classrooms and it works it's easy to execute by just about anybody in your bake shop and also you get really good results and people really like it so the recipe is on my link tree and if you miss the Wednesday lecture and demo of

how to mix any of my Recipes you can go watch it and then and join me on Sundays or you can watch Sundays tomorrow if this was in my bake shop I would just have the ingredients the amounts and creamy method and it would say melt butter creamy method but I've included some best practices the directions and then these are the ingredients broken down if you are going to learn from me anything that I can pass on to you that will help you improve as a baker and begin to think Like an ingredient and to

use critical thinking skills to make connections from one ingredient to the other so that when you look at a recipe you'll know if it looks like it's good or not these directions are not meant to be clung to you do exactly what's on here and then you're dming me saying my cookie didn't work out that's not the intention of what instructions are instructions are meant for you to take those ingredients and say okay I'm going to sift these out I'm going to cream these after I melt my butter and then I'm going to add the

eggs back and forth with a dry not over mixing and then adding the chocolate chips I'm going to scoop and then I'm going to refrigerate overnight up to two days wrapped very tightly so they don't dry out and then I'm going to freeze them because I like to have a nightly cookie and I like to take a frozen cookie and throw it on a pan slack it for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or Whatever and bake it so we my husband and I can have I can have a cowboy cookie and he can have a

chocolate chip cookie on different trays we can do this whenever we want if I have friends over or someone drops by I go in my freezer and I have a bunch of different flavors it's the most convenient thing for a home Baker but the cool thing about it is it's actually the most professional thing you can do these are my scoopers the green is what we're using I tried Using the smaller one trying to save calories but who cares if we don't want the calories Dave and I will just split the cookie what I like

about the size of the green Vol wrath scoop when I slack it for 20 to 30 minutes on a double pan with a Sil P put it in the oven it's going to melt and and settle exactly how I like it so I have that dialed in and you are going to dial this cookie in however you want to dial in the cookie why are comments being filtered I don't Understand we're talking about baking you know what's funny I can recall in the bakery that there are a lot of things that sound dirty that are

not perhaps that's what's going on and if that's true I mean that's hilarious I don't know what to say what is slap it's when you take a frozen cookie and let it sit at room temperature until you're ready to bake it and you typically put it on the pan and let it sit there let it slack I feel like a lot of cookies Use vanilla why didn't you use it in your recipe and that is a wonderful question because when I got this recipe first time I ask why and I don't know if you've tasted

it or not it has so much butter in it and the butter is melted and melted butter gives you a really nice mouth feel that if you were to put vanilla in you would be wasting your m money and if you run a business or if you care about that kind of thing you Don't want to just put vanilla in because you think it's going to make everything better you want to put vanilla in because it's necessary because it is needed and in this case it isn't so you could do a taste test and do

do it with vanilla but what I'm saying is when pennies matter vanilla is incredibly expensive so I've tast tested a few batches and The Taste is amazing but I can't get the bake right yes and that's why I'm doing it right now and to Get everyone caught up to speed I have this cookie slacking out of the freezer on the pan I took it out at noon it is 12:24 I'm going to flip the camera and take you with me this is my view I'm on the water okay so I have my cookie I'm going

to write down that it slacked for 20 minutes this is just me taking notes on my double sheet tray with salt on it and my Sil p and I'm going to open this oven quickly but I'm going to show you my oven thermometer okay this is a Propane oven I didn't buy it there we are we're right between 300 and 350 I always check my cookies at 8 minutes don't ask me why and if it's a big bar or something I check it at 20 minutes just to get a baseline so that I'm not going

too far with the bake there is a misbelief that you set an oven at a certain temperature and then you walk away and you come back and it's done and if you ask a chef or a cook oh how do you make that they'll be like Well first you do this then you move that then you do this and blah blah blah and do you have convection is it commercial convection you know what have you adjusted for what we are doing is defining what we want out of the cookie I want it to stay thick

in the middle I want the edges to get thinner and get really dark and caramelized but the inside to stay soft and chewy so that's going to require that it's on an insulated pan that I start between 325 And 350 350 is too high it'll get too Brown so I'm at 325 for 8 minutes or so if it's already Brown I'm going to go ahead and turn it down to 295 if it's not brown quite yet but it's spread out I'll make a determination I I can't tell you what I'm going to do because I

have to let the cookie I have to let the ingredients ingredient they're going to tell me what to do I'm not going to tell the cookie what to do the cookie in charge I'm not in charge I don't know Exactly how much a thaw when it slacked I don't know exactly what temperature it is but I can begin to build a system where I have it within a range of a desired outcome I want in your home you can just do one at a time and you can slowly go through and test it all cuz

again there's no rule there's only what the ingredients want you to do I will be here Wednesdays and Sundays and those entire videos will be put onto YouTube so you will get it you want to bake it In between Wednesday and Sunday you may but you might not get all the information cuz I like to parse it out just a little bit that's how the brain works that's how we learn if I don't have a double pan any solutions yes um you want to insulate in some way shape or form if you want it to

spread you can lower the temperature of the oven quite a bit and you'll have to test it but what you're going to be doing is melting that out and then setting it Just lower the temperature of the oven that's probably the most obvious I mean you can bake on glass on a Pyrex and you can take two cookie sheets if you have regular cookie sheets and just double those they don't even have to connect you just want to create an air barrier that'll give you a little bit of insulation let's go check on what's going

on with the cookies so first without opening I'm going to look in here and I see it's melting a little bit I want to see how Brown it is it's not really Brown yet that I'm going to give it 5 minutes I'm going to write that down just because I am a professional does not mean I don't make mistakes and it doesn't mean that I don't need guardrails because I do these recipes seem simple I have personal experience with handing somebody something ordinary and having them be like holy cow that isn't like anything I've ever

had before that's different and that's what you're Going for in general I do not throw up recipes like I you're not going to see hundreds of recipes and new recipes and I don't do that and I honestly don't know how other people do because developing a recipe is a very serious business and it's a lot of responsibility because I don't want you wasting your time or money so when you have problems with this cookie recipe I feel confident that I can help you and I won't do a recipe I don't feel confident About even though

I have really good recipes I have to have a point of view I have to have my opinion about it and I am not going to share something that I don't feel comfortable confident and strongly about so that's how I work I just think too many people are throwing up recipes and and not really having responsibility for how they work out in your home and I will not do that all right so we're at 325 and it's melted quite a bit more but let's see what the Color looks like so it's not getting super brown

yet but I like the spreads I'm going to turn my oven down to$ 2.95 for 9 minutes and I told you guys I'm bad at math I don't think people believe me I refuse to do math in my head I think it's ridiculous unless you're good at it and I am not 14 + 9 we're going to be around 23 and I know that the cookies they do pretty well around 23 minutes but I did lower it the reason I lowered it is because once it's spread where I Want it to go and it's starting

to get brown that means the exterior is becoming set which means it's not going to get any bigger if you have an oven that's variable cuz a lot of you have told me that your ovens aren't reliable just get it hot and then turn it down and just kind of keep an eye on it you can dve the oven and make the end product what you want it to be just by paying attention I think that finding a really good recipe and sticking with it Key if you're someone who jumps around and tries all these

different recipes that's really fun but I really find doing one thing like three times in a row in Rapid succession really internalizes what I need to learn right so I keep my mitts right next to I call them hot mitts let's take a look look here and you know what I'm going to do I'm going to pull it out which I don't normally do but I'm going to show you what I do with my dink dink I take my an Offset spatula and I literally create like surface area so that those parts get crinkled those

parts crinkle with flavor all right so you can see that the out it's like brown you see how Brown that is I don't want the edge to get Browner but the inside is absolutely not baked enough I'm going to leave it at 295 and I'm going to estimate 7 minutes I don't know if this seems crazy to you but this is literally how I do it and I think it might give you an idea of when You ask why I can't just give you an answer so seven more minutes will get us in around 30

it's slow but I know that I want that to go until it gets roasted roasting to me means that you're getting the myard reaction you're taking the sugars and proteins and you're caramelizing them this was the first cookie I did looks pretty good got nice it's thick it's got brownness 325 then I turned it down to 275 this was a smaller Blue scoop that I did at 275 the entire time and it's too light and it spread quite a bit cuz the temperature was a lot lower I dialed it in a little bit more but

I slacked it for a long time 45 minutes and look how flat it got because it got warmer at room temp basically I just slacked it too long it got flat so there's a lot of ways to play with this and mostly I'm going going to get a difference in texture in the Crunch and the flavor that's going to be the big But I'm taking notes the whole time so what I'm offering you in these recipes is the ability to look at a recipe I'm suggesting research it think about it determine the desired outcome read

through the recipe convert it all to grams and then analyze each ingredient before you even begin baking and think about it in terms of all the other ingredients and what it's going to do in the recipe you're working on then you're going to analyze the baker's percentage You're going to diagram out the method and then you're going to make labels you're going to scale the ingredients ahead of time you're going to gather your tools you're going to sanitize your workspace and all your tools and then when you're ready you're going to mix your batter or

dough you're make it up scale it you're going to rest it wrap it do whatever you need to do then you'll bake it cool it and then you'll evaluate it and you'll look at things like color Texture the appearance uniformity crumb things like that let's go over and check on it let's see it's getting a little brown you can never tell the color of a cookie inside the oven it's going to dark I'm going to go longer and I can see a little bit on the very inside that looks raw I don't know if you

can see that I'm just going to keep going and I'm going to keep going because I know I'm not going to burn it because I'm only at 2.95 I'm going to go four more Minutes decide on their own own and to use your own critical thinking skills so I am going to pull a cookie from the freezer all right so this is plenty dark for me right here all right so this is hot I always put a mitt there because it's a good habit and good rule whether you're at home or at work cuz you

think people are going to know that you have a hot pan but you might have a little kid or someone who doesn't and I have picked up Hot pans when people have not done that and it's not fun so around one 20 to 1:30 p.m. I'm going to put it in the oven change the temp 325 I'm going to go five higher than the last time and I'm going to write that down and this is how you take notes it's not an extra step it is vital though all right well I want to go through

very quickly this list of what ingredient functions are happening in this cookie While my frozen cookie slacks and the oven comes to temperature this is no different than my recipe I have the ingredients in exactly the same order I put in the baking percentages the weight and then the ingredient breakdown starting with butter and the kind of butter I use is 83% fat 16 to 18% water and solids and the solids are protein lactose and minerals it's a melted butter that's how we made it this gives us flavor mouth feel it acts as a Tenderizer

it gives us myard Browning and moisture it conducts heat the but but itself at the bottom of the pan is going to help Heat come through it's going to be a releasing agent so when I lift this hot cookie up wo it's going to come off of the pan the parchment or the sil P hat because of the fat that's what the butter is doing the next thing that's in here is sucrose and I call table sugar sucrose and I do that for a lot of reasons because if I were to say Anything else there

could be 10 things you could put in place of it when I say sucrose you're getting a sweetening power of 100% % which all other sugars are sort of compared to just like your flour is 100% Baker's percentage your sugar is 100% sweetening powder this is cane sugar and this sugar is 99.9% pure it's highly refined and it's a sweetener in this recipe so it contributes color and helps with the myard reaction those are its biggest Ingredient functions in this chocolate chip cookie recipe for brown sugar this is almost 100% sugar to flour so this

is a very sweet cookie my butter was around 57% of the weight of the flour brown sugar has 3 to 4% moisture it has 10% or less of molasses that's giving you some acid which will interact with the baking soda it's giving you some moisture color and flavor mine is made from cane sugar it helps soften the cookie cu it's providing some moisture it gives me a Nice reaction with the baking soda so those are its main ingredient functions I am using allpurpose flour I use King Arthur that is 11.7% protein that is more than

pastry flour but less than bread flour it's a structure Builder which is what gives your baked goods the ability once they're cool to not collapse that's what structure is it absorbs moisture and the best time for it to absorb moisture is in the refrigerator overnight when it's Chilling that's when the sugar and the flowers competing for the moisture that lives in your butter and in your eggs so King Arthur makes I think most of their flowers from hard wheat in the flour lives starch protein some natural gums so that gives me some binding some structure

and that's what the flour does in this recipe baking soda bicarbonate of soda you need moisture heat and an acid to activate it and that's why when it goes into your refrigerator it's not Being activated just like that it does need to go into the oven and get that heat activation and that's when you get the oven spring and all the gas that it creates is what fills up the holes that you've created during your mixing and creates your crumb structure and will give you the bubbles that you can see when you're analyzing your cookie

so it's a leaver leaver means to lighten and a baking soda in a cookie is to help lighten it if you were to increase it You would get more bubbles in a lighter cookie but if you go too far you'll get an off flavor so the moisture that is activating the baking soda is coming from my egg whites from the butter from the molasses so those things are imparting a lot to make the baking soda work in this recipe sea salt is a fine grain it gives us flavor and color the egg is giving us

structure and it's really important as a structure Builder because structure comes from protein egg Whites are made from protein you know if you're ever trying to add protein to your diet eating egg whites is good for you well that protein is the same reason you have structure in a cookie whole eggs provide both structure and tenderizing because of the Yol so you have the white is separate from the yolk these are two different ingredients in one in the yolk you are getting natural leathan and fat emulsify leathan is an emulsifier and emulsifiers are they're These

incredible things that attract both water soluble and fat soluble molecules that don't normally go together like water and oil and it holds them in a way that they stay together throughout the mixing in the baking mfic is how you create bubbles in your baking whether it's cookies or cakes that don't dissipate if you bake a cake you want those bubbles to stay right you don't want them to go like this and your emulsifiers help you do that and leathan Is a gift from nature in egg yolks and that's why this recipe has egg hole and

egg yolk and then finally chocolate chips and at a whopping 66.67% it's a lot of chocolate you can definitely go back on that but it gives you flavor color texture it looks nice so I've defined the outcome that I want the meth method the size and the importance of it the importance of baking and Cooling and storage and handling all matters to your final Outcome growing up we were taught not to open the oven I know yes and if I were here by myself I wouldn't be doing what I was doing I really like an

oven window it's very helpful you can ascertain a lot and the more you play with this and do one cookie at a time out of the freezer the more you'll build some intuition with this recipe some ovens regenerate like this very quickly they're very efficient some ovens aren't some aren't efficient when the door's Closed I mean we all know that so you know your oven and if you have an oven that's sensitive to it you want to keep it closed in general when you're at work if you've got an oven and people are standing there

with the door open they're going to get yelled at so yes shut the oven but I'm doing it for you does taking it out of the oven affect the process yes because if you think about carryover cooking you've begun gun this heating process and it's no Different than turning off the heat on top of your stove it was going upward and heat works like this it goes really really slow and then when it builds and gets to a point then it goes really really fast so you've interrupted that flow absolutely but I'm not going to

worry about it as much when my cookie is in the phase of roasting the most important time to be worried about opening the door or letting heat out or interrupting the process is when you're Working on that high heat at the beginning of baking when you want oven spring an oven spring which is so fun to watch in those videos where it's sped up it's where the oven so high hot and that the temperature in your ingredients gets so high that steam is created that chemical reactions are happening and it pushes up the crumb of

the flour and the structure and everything you have and creates this beautiful you know whatever you're making that's oven spring and yes You need a good steady heat to get that going but once you start roasting you know it's like a slow cooker you just need good heat over time at 325 but my oven's a little hot so I'm going to turn it down actually going to check these at 10 minutes and I'm going to write that down I'm not going to make a mistake this time not going to and then what I'll do is

pick which one of these cookies did I like the most that goes into my recipe notes and I keep Notes like this I bake these cookies just so you know for you eight or nine times yep so I've learned a little bit from my notes things are changing and I I really do like keeping notes I use light brown sugar when it's called for and dark brown sugar when it's called for I do what the recipe says the first time and if I have the urge to change something maybe I shouldn't be doing the recipe

that it's really important to learn the basics before you change a Thing the most commonly swapped out ingredients are like brown butter for butter making your own brown sugar people make their own vanilla extract you cannot make your own invert syrup you can make your own simple syrups a lot of people like to combine flowers and kind of get creative make a soured milk instead of a buttermilk all of these things are fine all useful and smart and everything all I ask people to do is to look at the Original ingredient you should be able

to identify what is that ingredient doing and then what does this ingredient do and do they align because if this just doesn't meet these standards why are you swapping it and this is how you think if you're converting gluten-free or vegan stuff cuz you're like I need an egg to do these things so if I'm going to choose an egg replacer applesauce pumpkin puree a flax seed egg it has to be replicating what this ingredient Function was given giving you that's how you do the swap so I always wonder why people are so excited to

make swaps before they've ever made a recipe the first time they've made it or just for fun it's like you need to justify why you're doing it and then once you can then you can move forward the same goes for non-fat milk solids to a cookie powdered milk identify why you're doing it and why do you need to do that and what changes were made and did you Adjust it properly and don't forget that if you're swapping out brown butter for regular butter you're losing a lot of stuff you need to be able to understand

and justify why you're doing something a lot of people are putting syrups on cakes now a syrup or a simple syrup flavored syrup is meant to moisten mostly sponge cakes putting it on an American High ratio buttercake makes literally no sense and actually ruins the cake so if you can justify it that's Fine but don't think more is better that is not the truth in baking I also think that mostly people underbake literally everything it's always too light soggy looks insipid I call it it's rampid on the internet and you need to bake everything a

lot longer in general and most people just zest too aggressively so if you going to be adding flavor and you want to layer in Citrus flavor use your non-dominant hand instead of taking that lemon and doing this you want to Hold it this way and very gently pull off just the very top outermost part you get underneath that orange part or lemon yellow part to the pith to the white then you get to the bitter L of people say they don't like zest and I know that's why they don't like it because they haven't had

it zested properly restaurants think about it you have a pastry chef maybe that works during the day makes the creme brulee and then hands it over to an entirely different Staff to execute there's a lot of trust there and if you aren't trained or training your people at every interval it's going to show up at the table and be less than what the pastry chef intended or you aren't spending money on a pastry chef because you want to save money and you have the nerve have a dessert menu that requires pastry technique and requires the

nuances of a trained pastry professional so I mean it's a frustration of mine but I'm a tough critic I'm testing to see how it spreads and I'm baking it I'm basically baking it and letting you determine what you want to do in your kitchen with your tools and equipment and your oven so you watch what I do and then I'll crack them all and you can see them and then you decide how long how hard you want to bake something how fast how dark it's all up to you and that's where the critical thinking and

the nuance and the Personal Touch comes in I'm changing mostly the temperature I'm also double panning my cookies slacking them from Frozen so there's a lot of things that I do that you don't have to do but if you do just keep thinking about why you're doing it and pick and choose the methods that you like and that work for you does the molasses and the brown sugar activate the baking soda yes it has an in it molasses is an invert sugar invert sugar means that the sucrose molecule has been broken the Bond into fructose

and glucose and that inverts it and if they do it chemically like if you were to buy an invert sugar they use heat and acid to chemically do that but nature does it for honey and nature does it for molasses which is so cool give you a shot Outdoors here it's a beautiful cold day in Connecticut I have the oven at 320 so there's very little color and it hasn't spread a ton but I'm not going to turn it down I'm going to do 10 minutes I am not saying that this is how I make

my cookies every day cuz I don't I am saying that while you're baking you are in charge and you get to decide what temperature the oven is if you want to cool the oven down quickly and open the door and close it and get the heat out if you want to use two pans if you want it crispy you want it thinner you get to determine all of those and the determinations are based based on the ingredients and percentages that you Incorporate them the mixing method how you bake something and on what tools do you

use and you get to come up with the product that you like that's why Tate's cookies are super thin and they're liked by people who like thin and crunchy cookies how long before we remove cookies from a tray great question the reason I left it is cuz I want it Browner this is the bottom of it looks so good if I overdid a cookie I mean there are times in a professional Kitchen where you normally do it perfect and then up one day you're like oh no you're like two 2 minutes over and it's dark

that is when pull them off and get them onto a stainless steel table to knock the heat out of them and cool them down so if you've got them too dark and you want to pull some heat off you can do that manually by taking them off the tray putting them on a cooling rack I get a lot of air flow so cooling is about the air flow and allowing the Temperature and moisture think about with a cake or a muffin if you didn't bake that muffin enough and there's all this moisture have you ever

done that where you pull it too soon and then the thing like smooshes in the middle and it it's like all that's because you didn't bake it long enough and you didn't evaporate enough moisture or you cooled it in the pan and didn't remove it after 8 to 10 minutes and so it's sitting in the pan as it's cooling instead of all Of that moisture evaporating into the air with air flow around it it sinks back in and ends up affecting your final thing that's why your bake good is not that's why people don't like

baking it's not done and perfect perfect until you have cooled it properly stored it properly and then gotten it to the person eating it in perfect condition people have said that I'm being elitist or snobby when I say you need a scale or you need to do it in grams all here's All I can say and I like to stick to the facts we are one of the only countries in the world that uses cups and spoons cups and spoons are not standardized and they're wildly in inaccurate you have a cell phone and you're looking

up recipes on a cell phone I would argue that you can find the resources to get a $10 scale or a $19 scale because the money you will save in the mistakes that you make in ingredients which are exorbitantly Expensive right now it'll it it's not it's not a bad thing it's a good thing let's let's bring it into the 90s I always say it's 2025 cups and spoons were invented in the 1890s it's time to time to get going not to be dramatic because the rest of my life began when I changed to grams

it's true I you okay you go into a classroom they don't say oh baby steps we're going to baby step you into using a scale and grams it's just done You don't see a cup or a spoon again the faster you can get rid of them you know you don't the difference between a home Baker and a professional seeking student in on the first day of class is nothing you're all the same so just make the leap it's not hard and it is life-changing absolutely I'm going to do this with my so it's getting pretty

Brown around the edges which I actually like so see how soft it is on the middle how do you adjust a cookie recipe when You want to replace the brown butter it's a great question because everybody wants brown butter in their cookies you would need to know exactly how much water the manufacturer has in your butter because you're going to subtract out the fat and the solid how much I don't know then you'd have to replace it so you'd have to do some recipe testing I don't actually do that I would start with a really

good reliable resource a rose Ley Baron bomb a Dory greenpan Stella Parks I would not just go to someone online that is not trained in recipe development if someone is putting out a new recipe every day that for me is a red flag how how do you do that I don't know how you'd possibly do that with Integrity the brownie that Stella Parks did is called the forever brownie because she tested it a brownie a simple brownie for so long that she was done she's like that's my forever brownie I'm not doing it again if

that if that tells You anything okay I would have to test it and you can't swap it and if you enjoy the Serendipity of it I think that's really fun and you can do whatever you want in your own kitchen this is very dark I actually really do like it this dark and when it cools I will show you that the interior is still soft and that's what I like about it so I'm just taking notes I get to do with this information anything that I I want in the future so I would start out

with A recipe that somebody reputable did that was a brown butter recipe and then if it was good I would use theirs after converting it to grams or doing whatever I needed to do if I didn't like it I thought it was really good but I wanted to tweak it then I would begin changing one thing at a time taking notes and recipe developing you can see that I have a certain way of working it is how professionals work and it is not the easy answer it's long and slow and it's Done by people who

are deeply interested and find that fun and don't think it's too much how inconsistent would it be to use tablespoons teaspoons for small ingredients in grams not very and if you are a a baker who's just baking occasionally in your home you can continue to use teaspoons and spoons I can't I bake and scale every day there is no way I'm going to stop and pull out and and put extract in a teaspoon then I got to use it for salt and it's sticking And even though I mult mples of them if it doesn't bother

you it's relatively accurate but if you're a professional you're trying to upscale you're trying to do more increase and decrease your recipes you're going to have to swap them to grams so it's it's about degrees of accuracy and how far in you want to go CU you are building your own practice in your own home you are learning the basics understanding the recipes understanding what happens when you make Changes what substitutions are allowed what ingredients do you're thinking like an ingredient and you're letting the ingredients ingredients cuz they're going to do what they do right

so whatever you do you need to think like the ingredient because the ingredient is going to ingredient it's not going to do what you want you can't make it you're not the bully the ingredients bully each other you can't you can't bully the ingredients 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday Wednesday's Eastern Standard time I'm in Connecticut which is outside of New York City if you're in the grand world and you're like where's you know where do you live 3 hours from New York by car depending on traffic and so we're on Eastern Standard Time 6:00 p.m. on

Wednesdays I will introduce the recipe desired outcome lecture the ingredients and then I will physically demonstrate how to make it and it'll go in the oven soon as it goes in the oven I will Pull out my finished samples cut them up show them to you up close talk about what I like and don't like it's really just meant to emulate the exact experience you would have if you were at a pastry school and how I was taught and how you know I taught my students your background I went I was self-taught for years ran

businesses been in the industry since I was 15 but then I went to pastry school at 41 and then I went to the French pastry school after and I Have staged intern worked and been in the industry working my butt off for a long time and then I taught and really through the teaching is when I began to dig into ingredient function and understanding how how to help people make connections so that you don't always have to have a baker or pastry chef nearby when you have a question you can solve it on your own

you can go to how baking works you can look at ingredient function and you can begin to Be your own answer person come back edit the recipe put it on my link tree and then I am going to begin to scale and work toward Wednesday so if you have any questions you want me to answer for Wednesday's lecture get them to me and I will include them in my lecture and in my answers I'm starting out with some foundational basic recipes and we will work into more complicated ones because you can't really understand a macaron

until you understand how eggs Work and how ingredient function works and you do that by beginning with the most simple obvious most internalized recipes which are cookies muffins and things like that then when we start talking about advanced concepts as you begin to put all this information together you'll be like oh that'll make sense that's where the connection comes in and that's the AHA moments and I used to see people in my class rooms they'd be standing there and they'd say that's Why that happens to me every time and it's those are the connections that

will make you a really good Baker so 6: pm. Eastern Standard Time us on Wednesday evening and then on Sundays at noon Eastern Standard Time so it's not just one answer one thing nothing I do is simple it's layered and it's nuanced and tedious and some people aren't into it and if you're not that's fine but I am going to continue to get into the nitty-gritty of baking so the more Education the more information the more power you have all right so I'm going to look at what I baked here the first one this was

the bigger scoop this is at 325 I like the weight love the color look at the shininess of the butter lots of really nice chocolate chip and this has been sitting a while this is cool looks very nice it looks a little underdone in in the middle I'm going to write that down I can go back and look at all my notes and come up with the Best practice for baking my cookie all right so this was the one it was the smaller blue scoop that I did at 275 the whole time and there it's

a lot lighter in color and then obviously I baked it kind of light in color and it's very soft so that was at 275 the whole time I don't know if you can tell look at the difference in how many bubbles this one has over this one this one had a better oven spring it got a little bit Thicker they're both going to taste good but we're just we're talking nuances so that was two that was underdone and no oven spring thinner this is number three this was the large green scoop I slacked it for

30 minutes which is longer than 20 and look just because of that look how much thinner it is um and then I baked it 3 325 turned it down to 295 then it was like spreading a lot so I turned the oven back up well I mean I like that it's dark on the edges and It's got okay color on the bottom but it's too thin I don't like it this thin I like it to be thin on the edges and really dark and then thicker in the center and I like the dark on the

bottom but the middle to be cooked but um not underbaked yeah not dark enough and too much spread okay and then I'm going to save the best one for last this is the last one I did I slacked it the one we did together I slacked it for 20 minutes baked it at 320 for the whole time this Has the Malden salt on it beautiful you guys might think that this is too dark this is actually how I like it and the Bottom's dark but is not burned but it smells different that is brown butter

brown butter is brown the flavor in the fat which is Flats of conduit for flavor the flavor is in the fat and the brown is the flavor that one might just be all there's a lot of CH one of these had a Lot of chocolate chips so we have to look at I mean to me that's the best super dark cooked all the way through it's got nice ni lift it's thicker in the middle it's craggy I I just personally this is my favorite and I think that's going to taste the best chocolate chocolate everywhere

and then I thought that one was good but I love that love very dark this was the one I deemed might be the best but now that I see that dark one I don't know so this One 20 minute slack 325 then I turned it down to 295 and then I roasted it and the total was 30 minutes we did this one together that's a ni that's nice color on the back I like that it's thick but I don't like that I didn't get the thin Edge through the spread so that's most likely because it

could have slacked a little bit longer but let's see nice you got nice some air here dark crumb dark bottom there's that edge I Like I didn't get enough of that that's where some of the flavor is too so when I I eat a cookie like this you get like the soft fully baked on the interior yummy different and then around here look at that dark this tastes different than that when I take a bite here it's different than this and that so these are all just a little different I think it's beautiful and so

I get to go through my Cookies and my process and decide which style I like and then that becomes the one that I make for myself I write it down and it's my own process so your process is going to be a little different in your own home and in your own kitchen so that's kind of like the last one but not as dark I mean it could have gone darker and not enough spread this is me showing you in real time how I work and I absolutely love this I've had a blast you guys

are the most Engaged smartest freaking audience ever because every time I get a question I have to like pull out how baking works or I have to pull out my notes and be like what's the answer because you guys are smart it's that response from people they take a bite and they go I didn't expect this and then they take another bite and it's like this whisper that gets away from you so you have to take another bite that's what I live for is When someone says oh my gosh I didn't think it was going

to be good it was like amazing it is a happy place because there aren't a lot of things we can control in this world but we can find a recipe we can convert it that's relaxing we can scale it out that's super relaxing we can mix it and then we can let it sit in the refrigerator it's totally relaxing and then we can bake it when we need it and we can make people Happy I mean so it's a it's a wonderful time to be in baking and pastry and I am so excited to be

here with all of you I look forward to this I will be here Wednesday at 600 p.m. sharp we'll get started just chatting answering some questions and then I'll get into the lecture and the demo I am thank thankful that all of you are here and I need you all to keep asking questions and sharing what you know and what you need and what you want Miriam says God bless people Like you who don't gatekeep nope and if someone gatekeep and I can name some people but I won't shame on them all they're doing is

messing with your ingredients in your time and frustration it drives me crazy so there's always more to learn I am here to share with you the things that I learned that were life-changing and I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday and if you have any questions about the tools ingredients please let me know I'll get To the method on Wednesday but if you have anything you need to prep to get ready for Wednesday and you have a question let me know this is the practice of pastry baking club we are all members and

we are all learning together and I appreciate all of you very very much thank you so much see you next week happy baking and I'll not next week well I'll see you Wednesday take care