Last night, as I often do, I decided to bake some cookies to share at Clifton Springs Library’s Friday coffee hour. Rather than using one of my favorite recipes, I decided to bake Big and Chewy Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies from an America’s Test Kitchen cookbook. I had made this recipe once before and considered it a reliable choice.
My first pan of cookies was a mess. When I took it out of the oven, it contained an undifferentiated mass of congealed goop; it was impossible to separate individual cookies. I broke up the mass as best I could and dumped the resulting pieces into a plastic bag. The stuff was edible, but barely. It was time to try again.
This time, I spaced the balls of dough farther apart. The result was not unlike that of the first batch, but the cookies were at least discrete. They did, however, resemble pralines more than cookies—more stuff for the plastic bag! (See photo below.)
As I was preparing a third pan, I realized that the dough lacked its usual stiffness. And I suddenly realized that I had used no flour! I glanced at the recipe, however, and noted that the first entry in the ingredient list was
1½ cups (7½ ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
Oops! How could I have failed to put flour into the dough? I slowly and carefully reread the instructions. Step 3 read as follows:
Decrease the speed [of the stand mixer] to low and slowly add the dry ingredients until combined, about 30 seconds. Mix in the oats and raisins (if using) until just incorporated.
I had interpreted “the dry ingredients” to mean the salt, baking powder, and nutmeg. It hadn’t occurred to me that flour was construed as a dry ingredient. It hadn’t helped that ingredients were not listed in the order used. The order of the ingredient list was, in retrospect, rather arbitrary. (Other recipes in the same cookbook used lists following the same convention.)
There was still dough in the mixing bowl, so I incorporated what seemed like a proper fraction of the 7½ ounces of flour to go with the leftover dough. The modified dough then behaved as expected. In the end, I managed to produce 10 reasonably-looking and -tasting cookies. (See the picture of the penultimate batch below.)
The obvious lesson from this unfortunate experience is to read the instructions carefully in the context of the ingredient list. Arguably, I had actually done that. Had I read the instructions and also checked off the ingredients as I did so, I would have failed to check off flour, and I might have realized that it was a “dry ingredient.” Perhaps a better strategy would have been to employ mise en place, that is gathered and measured all the ingredients before assembly. In that case, once the dough was “finished,” my bowl of flour would have been conspicuously left over.
Well, I have become a wiser baker!
