How do you bake good cookies? There are plenty of recipes, including some bold ones. But sometimes the proportions of the ingredients are incorrect, and sometimes the recommended procedure is a little strange or even contradictory.
The scientific mind may first ask when cookies are ever good. You want a crumbly and crumbly texture, but above all a lot of taste, based on classic ingredients such as flour, eggs, butter, sugar … not forgetting the pinch of salt that releases the fragrance and at the same time enhances the taste.
Let’s focus on consistency first. As early as 1759, the chemist Johannes Kesselmeer, a chemist in Strasbourg, conducted an experiment in which he made a ball of dough from flour and water and then “washed” it, that is, kneaded it with water. From this one can conclude that flour consists of starch and gluten (a mixture of different proteins). The last substance is what causes the dough to stick together: the water forms bridges between the proteins, which thus form a three-dimensional network in which the starch grains are trapped. However, such a material is very difficult – it is very different from the short, crumbly pastry that we want to make.
Toasted flour has a taste close to the taste of chocolate
Adding sugar helps loosen the net. If you add icing sugar to a ball of flour and water, the dough loses its texture in a few seconds and starts to flow. The sugar pulls water from the protein bridges, and a syrup is created in which the starch granules are enclosed. If you want to reduce the contribution of gluten, this can easily be achieved by toasting the flour beforehand, for example under the grill in the oven or in a saucepan without adding fat. You get delicious toasted flour that has been stripped of some of its proteins and thus forms a perfect, crumbly consistency with other ingredients. In addition, the taste of toasted flour is close to the taste of chocolate.
“Alcohol buff. Troublemaker. Introvert. Student. Social media lover. Web ninja. Bacon fan. Reader.”