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Intro
Having already gone thru “Creating Amazing Cookies: The Science of Texture and Troubleshooting” we learned a plethora of information about the textures of cookies, different ways to achieve those characteristics, and troubleshooting issues.
If we want to design a cookie that is crispier with a lot of spread, we know we need to have a high sugar high fat content recipe. However, if we don’t know what relatively high sugar or fat content is, we won’t know how to scale the proportions of ingredients up or down accordingly.
In this section, we will go over some basic ratios for different kinds of cookies. Additionally, I will be breaking down some famous chocolate chip cookie recipes into their bakers’ ratios and in our next post we will bake our cookie recipes, observe their characteristics, and note how changes in the proportions of ingredients impact the final product.
Baker’s Ratio
It’s important to note that when I compare these recipes, I break them down into baker’s ratios. A baker’s ratio holds the weight of the flour at 100% and every other ingredient in its proportion to the flour. For example,
if a recipe has 1000 grams of flour and 550 grams of brown sugar then
You divide
550 grams brown sugar/ 1000 grams flour
and the baker’s ratio is 55% brown sugar.
Using a baker’s ratio makes it easy to compare recipes because it accounts for scale. Let’s say, you have one recipe that yields 2 dozen cookies and one that yields 5 dozen cookies and they both call for two eggs. While technically both recipes have the same number of eggs, one has less egg because the yield is greater. Therefore, Baker’s ratio is the best way for us to compare recipes.
Different Cookie Ratios
According to On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, some common cookie ratio proportions are as follows: 1
| Cookie | Flour | Total Water | Eggs | Butter | Sugar | Chemical Leavening |
| Shortbread (crumbly) | 100 | 15 | – | 100 | 33 | – |
| Biscotti | 100 | 35 | 45 | 85 | 60 | yes |
| Chocolate chip (cakey) | 100 | 38 | 33 | 50 | 100 | yes |
| Tuiles/ Wafers (crisp) | 100 | 80 | 80 | 50 | 135 | – |
| Pastry Doughs | ||||||
| Sables (crumbly) | 100 | 25 | 22 | 50 | 50 | – |
| Puff/Palmiers (crumbly) | 100 | 35 | – | 75 | (topping) | – |
| Creamed-butter batters | ||||||
| Tea cookies (crumbly) | 100 | 25 | 18 (whites) | 70 | 45 | – |
At face value, the information in this chart may seem to contradict “Creating Amazing Cookies: the science of texture and troubleshooting”. For example, it was said in the troubleshooting post that low water content indicates a crispy cookie. However, looking at this chart, you’ll see that tuiles have a higher water content than many other cookies while being a crispier cookie. How does that make sense?
When looking at the composition of these recipes it’s important to know that all these recipes are made up of a balance of tougheners, tenderizers, moisteners, and driers2. The ingredients all fulfill these purposes, and some ingredients can be dual purposed in ways that contradict each other. For example, eggs can be both a toughener and a moistener. I will explain this more in-depth as we get more and more granular in the science.
This is just to say, that while a recipe may have a higher water content and still be crispy it could be because it has more tougheners or is made by a different mixing method.
You can’t look at different percentages of ingredients of entirely different cookies and expect that the troubleshooting principles will hold true. However, the troubleshoot principles are going to be entirely helpful when comparing the compositions of same kind of cookies with the same mixing methods and developing our own recipes.
So now, it’s time for my favorite part of applying all this knowledge that we’ve learned, comparing famous chocolate chip cookie recipes! We will only be comparing chocolate chip cookie recipes that are made with a traditional creaming method.
Also, unlike the Harold Mcgee method, I will be separating brown sugar percentages from white sugar percentages and doing a total sugar percentage. I will also be separating and combining the percentages if different flours are used.
Chocolate Chip Cookie Ratios
| Chocolate Chunk & Chip by Bouchon Bakery 3 | |
| All-Purpose Flour | 100% |
| Dark Brown Sugar | 56% |
| White Sugar | 44% |
| Total Sugar | 100% |
| Molasses | 5% |
| Unsalted Butter | 70% |
| Eggs | 25% |
| Chocolate Chips | 45% |
| Chocolate Chunks | 45% |
| Total Chocolate | 90% |
| Toll House Chocolate Chip | |
| All-Purpose Flour | 100% |
| Brown Sugar | 61% |
| White Sugar | 56% |
| Total Sugar | 117% |
| Butter | 84% |
| Eggs | 37% |
| Chocolate Chips | 124% |
| Jacques Torres Chocolate Chip Cookie | |
| Cake Flour | 50% |
| Bread Flour | 50% |
| Total Flour | 100% |
| Brown Sugar | 59% |
| White Sugar | 47% |
| Total Sugar | 106% |
| Unsalted Butter | 60% |
| Eggs | 21% |
| Chocolate feves | 117% |
| My Classic Best Chocolate Chip Cookies by Dorie Greenspan 4 | |
| All-Purpose Flour | 100% |
| Brown Sugar | 61% |
| White Sugar | 83% |
| Total Sugar | 144% |
| Unsalted Butter | 94% |
| Eggs | 24% |
| Finely Chopped Bittersweet Chocolate | 140% |
| Nuts | 70% |
These cookie percentages vary from each other and look very different from the standard ratio presented by Harold Mcgee. So, in my next post I will go through each recipe and explain what I think each cookie will be like based on these percentages. I will bake them all and do a compare and contrast. In the meantime, look over the recipes, and based on everything we’ve learned so far give me your predictions and impressions in the comment section!
TL/DR
- In order to understand how to customize our cookie recipes we have to have a baseline ratio to work from
- Its best to compare different recipes by breaking them down into a bakers ratio
- A bakers ratio lists everything in proportion to the flour content: weight of secondary ingredient/ weight of flour= ratio of secondary ingredient
- It’s important when comparing two recipes baker’s ratios that they be the same kind of item made by the same mixing method.
- All recipes consist of a combination of moisteners, tougheners, driers, and tenderizers.
if you have questions leave them in the comments, and I will answer them!
If you’re interested in purchasing our source material to read further here’s some links: On Food and Cooking by Harold Mcgee, How Baking Works by Paula Figoni, Bouchon Bakery by Thomas Keller, Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan
- McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen. Scribner, 2004. ↩︎
- Figoni, Paula. How Baking Works: exploring the fundamentals of baking science. John Wiley & Sons, 2011. ↩︎
- Keller, Thomas et al. Bouchon Bakery. Artisan, 2012. ↩︎
- Greenspan, Dorie. Dorie’s Cookies. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. ↩︎