WASHINGTON — Dec. 4 is National Cookie Day, and what better way to celebrate than chatting about all things cookie with two of D.C.’s best bakers?
Just in time for the holidays, they offer insight on the best ingredients, as well as tips on how to survive in the kitchen this holiday season.
Meet Jenna: Jenna Huntsberger has been a professional baker for years,
and in 2011, she launched Whisked!, a baking
company that specializes in pies, quiches
and cookies. Huntsberger and her team bake out of Union Kitchen, a commercial food
incubator space
in Northeast D.C., and sell Whisked! goodies at local farmers markets and area
specialty
stores.
When it comes to cookies, Huntsberger is in high demand. She makes six varieties — salty oatmeal, milk chocolate Nutella, brown butter
snickerdoodle, double chocolate chip, molasses spice and “pretzel cowboy” — and stays
very busy, churning out about 4,000 a week.
Huntsberger says she develops her recipes after selecting a “base recipe” from a
reputable source.
“I find that I have the most success if I go to places like Cooks Illustrated or King
Arthur Flour or Smitten Kitchen. I would
look at the places you’re getting the recipe,”
she says.
“Once I have a good base, I just look at what people are interested in, what’s popular,
what’s trending, and make changes to those base recipes to come up with our different
flavors.”
Where She Splurges: It’s no mystery that the quality of the ingredients affects
the quality of the final product. And Huntsberger says
she likes to splurge on a few ingredients, such as butter, chocolate
and
vanilla extract.
What’s the point in buying high-quality butter? Huntsberger explains that fat carries
flavor, so high-quality butter improves the overall flavor of the
cookie. The same goes for chocolate.
“A chocolate chip cookie that’s made with a really high-quality, 60 percent cacao
chocolate chip or chocolate coin is going to taste better than something that was made
with the bargain brand chocolate that you got at the supermarket,” she says.
The Best Tips for Baking Cookies: Ready to pull out the flour and pre-heat the
oven? Huntsberger says to keep a few important things in mind before you get
down to baking. For starters, make sure whatever cookie recipe you’re using calls for
salt.
“Salt is going to balance all of your flavors and keep your cookie from tasting flat.
So definitely make sure that’s in your recipe, and if it’s not there, I would add a half-teaspoon or something,” she says.
Also, make sure to read the entire recipe — from beginning to end — before you start
baking.
You may find that you need a few more ingredients, or more time with the dough
than you allotted.
“You never know if there’s going to be a step in the end that says, ‘You need to chill
this dough overnight before you bake it,’ because if you get through your recipe and
throw it in the oven, you’re going to really mess up your cookie,” Huntsberger says.
Similarly, prep your ingredients the
night before to make sure everything is at room temperature.
“Butter that’s at room temperature is going to cream much more evenly and consistently
than butter that’s cold, that you’re trying desperately to beat until it’s going to
cream with your sugar,” Huntsberger says. “You’re saving yourself a lot of hassle if you take it out of your fridge the night
before.”
Meet Meredith: Meredith Tomason is the pastry chef and owner of RareSweets, a bake shop
set to open at CityCenterDC around Dec. 15. The shop will focus on “American heirloom
baking recipes,” with an emphasis on layer cakes and ice cream, made from recipes
Tomason’s collected over the years.
“We’re trying to reinterpret [the recipes] and bring them back and show them to a new
audience,” she says.
Just because cakes and ice creams are a focus doesn’t mean Tomason is leaving cookies
off the menu — she says she plans to make a number of varieties and will
change up the menu seasonally. Some of her cookie offerings include gingersnaps, cocoa
crinkles, coconut macaroons, chocolate chip cookies and “a fun play on an oatmeal
raisin cookie.”
Where She Splurges: Similar to Huntsberger, Tomason agrees that using a high-quality butter can make or break a cookie. She also says that using farm-fresh eggs
makes a better product by creating a richer flavor.
“Eggs actually do put a little extra fat into your batter,” says Tomason, who explains
that, in addition to tasting rich, farm-raised eggs also have a subtle floral note
to them.
“A lot of people don’t think about it that way, or don’t think about eggs that way, but
they do definitely lend themselves to a different flavor.”
And when it comes to vanilla extract, Tomason says that browsing through a local specialty
store that carries different varieties of vanillas is worth the effort.
“Similar to coffee or chocolate, different vanilla beans have different notes that can
play into different kinds of cookies in some ways,” she says.
The Best Tips for Baking Cookies: Hoping to avoid a cookie catastrophe? Tomason
has a few pieces of advice.
Take a few minutes to run a whisk through your dry ingredients, Tomason says.
“In the mixing process, make sure you don’t have any lumps in your flour. You don’t
want people to bite into a cookie and have a big mouthful of flour,” she says.
And just as Huntsberger advises, working with room temperature butter and eggs makes
the creaming process go faster.
Tomason says people often overlook scraping the
sides of the bowls — a job that’s great to task out to little helpers.
“It sounds kind of silly, but I tell people this all the time, even in our bakery: You
need to make sure all of the little bits on the side of the bowl get incorporated into
the batter. And make sure you scrape the bottom of the bowl if you’re using a stand
mixer. Just make sure everything’s really, really incorporated,” she says.
Want to save on time and cleanup? One secret many don’t know is that, for most cookies,
you can mix the batter, shape the cookies and freeze them in an air-tight container.
When you want to make cookies, you can pull them out and bake them as needed.
“That’s a really good tip if you’re having multiple holiday parties and you just need
to bake off 12 cookies or whatever for different occasions,” Tomason says. “It saves
you from having to do the mixing step a few times. You can just do it once and then
take it out when you need to.”
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