eternity in a bowl of cookie dough

[jjhunter]

gentle readers, i have a conundrum.

for many years, my signature cookie for gifts and contributions to inefficient fund-raising endeavors has been the humble oatmeal scotchie, the recipe for which conveniently located on the back of every bag i buy of nestle butterscotch morsels. on each occasion, i would smugly anticipate the happy result of my picturesque culinary efforts. ten minutes into the recipe, however, i would suddenly recollect the sheer amount of time remaining and forthcoming toll on my wrists with passionate loathing. yet i consoled myself with the thought that two hours plus of hard work was simply the price i had to pay for my four dozen allotments of unhealthy delight.

imagine my joy at discovering an intriguing new recipe of equivalent impressiveness that only required a mere twenty minutes to prepare, for a grand total of thirty-four minutes to yield the first tray of total forty-eight cookies. these cranberry orange cookies seemed an excellent addition to my usual holiday baking, permitting me to economize with twice the number of cookie-gifts for at most only a fifty-percent increase in time.

but it was not to be so. i was stuck in my kitchen for a straight four and a half hours, causing much concern and chastisement from the other inhabitants of my dwelling.

to add insult to injury, i discovered that the nestle website blithely lists the prep time for oatmeal scotchies as ten minutes, and the cook time as seven. these figures, i wish to emphasize for those not following carefully, are half those posted for cranberry orange cookies.

this is not a state of affairs that can be permitted to continue. my dignity, my self-respect, and the minor matter of my reputation as competent in the kitchen depend on closing the achievement gap between myself and those posting enthusiastic reviews on cooking websites with frequent resort to all caps. i have decided to throw myself on the collective mercy of crowd-sourcing. listen closely, dear readers, for i do not say this lightly: help me, omnomnom kenobi et al. you're my least embarrassing source of hope.

x-posted to boilingwater

Font of post changed from courier new to 'default' as per request.

Comments

[amadi]

Um, what exactly is your question?

[jjhunter]

i'm looking for tips, any tips, on speeding up prep and the complicated dance of trays in and out of the oven. i'm desperate here.

[amadi]

The trick to prep is mise en place. Get all of your ingredients, pre-measure, have everything that you need before you need it.

The dance of trays in and out of the oven is something rather unavoidable unless you've got enough trays to batch out all of your dough at once, and adequate counter space to rotate trays and let things cool properly. How many baking trays do you have? Cooling racks? How much counter space?

[jjhunter]

i do my best to have everything out and ready before i need it. not being in possession of a kitchen slave an assistant, this takes longer than i would like. i find myself suspecting that this essential prior assemblage is struck from the mockingly low 'prep time' asserted by the aforementioned recipes.

on friday, i found myself in possession of two large cookie trays for the first time in my baking experience. halleluiah. otherwise, i possess four of inconvenient size and rectangular shape, two by four grid capacity, and two more square, with three by four capacity. counter space is decent, but quite spread out. cooling racks may well be the rate-determining step in how fast trays can move in and out of the oven; before shifting the parchment paper + cookies off a particular tray, i must always shift the previous batch off my sole & rather decrepit cooling rack. on further consideration, the limited counter space near the top of the oven also complicates matters, requiring consolidation and/or relocation of cooling cookies relatively quickly.

i had not thought of attempting to 'batch out' all of my dough at once, but in hindsight it seems blindly obvious. it would solve the problem of overly warm dough and necessity of periodic chilling, permit closer monitoring of baking progress, and eliminate variance in starting time between concurrent trays. brilliant.

thank you for sharing your experience with me. surely i can engineer the flow of the oven stage more efficiently for my particular set of kitchen variables; must think on this further.

[amadi]

Having too many trays is as bad as having too few. I did chocolate chip today with one tray and two silpats. I batched one silpat, put it in to bake. Gave it five minutes to cool on the tray and batched the other silpat. Traded out, put batch two in to bake, let the other continue to cool, and on and on. I wouldn't pre-batch on parchment without a tray, though.

[fish_echo]

I've been able to pre-batch on parchment before, but only when transferring to a tray that has no raised sides and only when I have sufficient counter space that things aren't crowded.

[amadi]

I'd be concerned in a warm kitchen that pre-batching on parchment would end up with excessive spreading. I was battling that today on silpats which control spreading pretty nicely.

[fish_echo]

Ah, right, temperature.... So the last time that I had the counterspace to do pre-batching, I lived somewhere cold and the extra counterspace was right near a single-pane window, so I didn't have to worry about that. Thanks for catching me on that!

Wow, you must have had quite a warm kitchen! I hope today's baking went well regardless?

[amadi]

When the oven is on, my kitchen is a toasty warm haven. It's nice on a day like today when it never hit 40. I was keeping my battered chilled between batches and that was important today! The baking went well, there will be more over the next few days, more cookies, some cakes and shortbread!

[fish_echo]

Oh, that sounds lovely! (Both the warm kitchen and the cooking intentions.) I wish you the best of luck in the baking and the eating of those!

[snakeling]

I ran into the same problem last week, and here's what I did:

You need two trays + insane amounts of parchment paper + some counter/table space.

Put parchment paper on the first two trays and fill them with raw cookies. If you need to do something to them when they're cooked but still hot, put only one of the trays in the oven, then put the second when approximately half the cooking time for the first tray has passed. That way you're staggering it, which makes it easier logistically. I also suggest putting the tray first on the bottom grid, then switching it to the top grid when you're changing the other tray.

For the rest of the cookies, put them on parchment paper cut approximately the size of the tray. When you take a tray out of the oven, you slid the parchment paper onto a cooling rack, then slid a full parchment paper onto the tray and pop it back into the oven.

I suggest preparing all the batches before starting to bake, otherwise you'll find that you can't keep up, which is just annoying :)

[jjhunter]

i have already converted to the cult of parchment paper, and suppressed all memory of cookie baking prior to their use. 'preparing all the batches before starting to bake,' as both you and amadi have suggested, seems blindingly obvious in hindsight. it certainly would have averted some of my more complex misadventures with staggering three different starting times whilst continuing to portion out dough.

amusingly enough, i do usually cut out all the appropriately-sized sheets of parchment paper i will need beforehand. that i didn't make the necessary mental leap lends vague credence to insinuations from certain parties not to be named regarding head-damage as a small child. ETA: and now i confirm with my careless disregard for closing html tags, etcetera. many apologies.

thank you for your suggestions; i hope our mutual enthusiasm for this most unappreciated of baking necessities will enlighten some other poor soul scrolling through these comments in equally desperate straits.

[snakeling]

Psst, if you prefer to read things in Courier New, there are ways to do that that don't involve you hard-coding it every single time :)

If you want me to show you how, let me know:
- what browser you use
- whether you want every single font on the web to display as Courier New, or just Dreamwidth

:)

[rainbow]

do you mix by hand? if so, a stand or even a hand mixer will drop the time significantly.

[jjhunter]

are these accessories compatible with oat-heavy recipes?

[sporky_rat]

Oh yes. My stand mixer (a Sunbeam that I soooo want to upgrade to a KitchenAid) can whiz through double-oatmeal cookies in no time. (Double oatmeal involves the double amount of oats.)

[rainbow]

are you familiar with the kitchen aid outlet. i've gotten several refurbished things from them at about half price, and each has been in perfect condition. (it's at http://www.shopkitchenaid.com/category.asp?CAT=OUTLET)

[sporky_rat]

I am, in fact, I've just not had the spare monies to devote to it (the Sunbeam Mixmaster was a re-gift from my mother to whom it had been re-gifted by a retired caterer who has three Kitchen Aid professionals so didn't need it.)

[jjhunter]

i can see where my next paycheck is going.

[jjhunter]

this is good to know. 'double-oatmeal' + stand mixer might well resolve my ongoing experiment re: how much i can reduce the oatmeal scotchie recipe's butter quota before the cookies fall apart completely. desire to retain some wrist function has limited my progress to date.

[rosefox]

In the meantime, you may wish to look into recipes that call for softening or melting the butter. I have tendinitis in both arms, so I'm pretty sensitive to this; I heart my DeLonghi stand mixer but could probably mix my brownie batter by hand if I needed to, as melted butter offers very little resistance.

For any recipe that calls for creaming butter and sugar together, leave the butter on the counter for half an hour first to soften. Your wrists will thank you.

[rainbow]

it depends on the mixer, but most should be able to handle it just fine, stand mixers more reliably than hand mixers.

aside from that, organisation helps. have your ingredients together and at room temp, have your racks and cookie sheets ready, preheat the oven, mix the dough.

most ovens have at least 2 racks, so one can do 2 sheets' worth of cookies at a time; if you have 4 sheets, that's only 2 batches thru the oven. when one batch comes out, slide the other in, let the cookies on the first racks cool a couple minutes, then put them on racks.

if you've only 2 racks, let them cool until they're cool to the touch, then drop and bake the 2nd set.

i fill the sink with hot soapy water either before i start or when the first batch are in the oven, and drop everything into it as i finish with it. then clean up takes only a couple minutes.

[jjhunter]

as per my reply to amadi upthread, i am organized about essential prior assemblage. the second baking stage, however, can use some work: i often open the oven to take out or put in trays at least twelve separate times, probably fifteen. limiting factors include motley assortment of small 'sheets' (this last has been alleviated as of friday), a sole small cooling rack, and inefficient use of spread out counter space exasperated by bottleneck of aforementioned cooling rack.

luckily, my counters are sufficiently cool to safely shorten time on the rack. cleanup of trays is unnecessary due to blatant use of parchment or wax paper for lining them prior to application of cookie dough. this latter also facilitates transportation of cookies from tray to rack, rack to counter, and permits cookie dough division when trays are unavailable.

thank you for your suggestions; the use of mixers should certainly reduce the overall time.

[azurelunatic]

Did you channel jdn on purpose?

*is thoroughly charmed, but not particularly helpful on cutting cookie-preparation time*

[jjhunter]

synecdochic's writing has taken over my brain. One would expect Cammie's voice, but no.

[monanotlisa]

Delightful as your post was, would you terribly mind not hard-coding your font as Courier New?

[jjhunter]

i shall take care of it right away, respected personage. would courier and/or monospace be acceptable alternatives, or would you simply prefer the default?

[monanotlisa]

The default is fine because then my blog settings automatically render my friendspage readable.

Thank you!

[red_trillium]

Pre-measure & mix the dry ingredients that you would usually mix before the wet stuff & bag in a sealable baggie. If you do this a week to 2 before you bake then you can dump them into the bowl, add the wet stuff & mix. That should save you a bit of time.

That's the only thought I have so far but shall ponder this further.....

[jjhunter]

you are a font of wisdom and cooking genius. i had, on the aforementioned occasion, intended to put one batch of cookie dough into the fridge to bake the next day, but grew too cowardly to even freeze it upon careful reconsideration of the chemical properties of baking soda.

the segregation of the queen of wet and dry would also presumably permit refrigerating wet for one to two days before use.

as for end additives such as oats or, for other recipes, chopped things of various categories, i am already in the habit of preparing them beforehand. i must admit to a certain pleasure in an uninterrupted mixing of the full sequence of ingredients followed by a speedy entrance into the oven.

[rosefox]

Any cookie dough I've ever made has been perfectly happy to spend 24 or even 72 hours in the fridge. Form it into logs, wrap it in plastic wrap, and then either slice it into cookie-size rounds while it's cold (for firmer cookies that spread less) or bring it to room temp before baking.

[feuervogel]

There's also Alton Brown's suggestion to form your cookies (drop balls, log slices, shaped things) and put them on trays in the freezer overnight, then pick them off and put them into freezer containers. When you want to bake them, set them out on your tray while the oven is heating and bake as directed. (It might take a minute or two longer.)

The benefit of this is that you can make a small batch of delicious cookies (or even just one or two) whenever you want. Mmm.

The important part is to shape your cookies before you freeze them, otherwise you have to thaw the whole chunk of dough. (I learned this the hard way.)

[rosefox]

Ooh, what a lovely idea. Thank you!

[brigid]

What?

You can totally slap cookie dough in the fridge or the freezer just fine.

In fact, cookie dough often tastes better after being in the fridge over night. Like a soup or a casserole, the flavors mingle and develop more.