What a Life!

While Mom and Dad were here, we ate at Valentino’s – a famed local pizza parlor. For dessert, we ate cookies. Chewy cookies. Cookies that had substance to them. They were about 3/8″ thick (or thereabouts). My cookies? They’re like the Platte River – a mile wide and an inch deep…the little chocolate chips sticking out like huge mountains on a great wide plain of cookie dough…in stark contrast.

Which got me to thinking…

I’ve baked Pillsbury cookies before from the dough they sell in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. They came out like the cookies at Val’s.

I also used to work at an apartment complex, selling apartments, and every day we made Otis Spunkmeyer cookies. We took the little frozen balls of dough they sent us, put them on the pan and then straight into the oven where they baked to perfection…just like the ones at Val’s.

Do you see where I’m going here?

This weekend I decided to experiment. On Saturday, I made cookie dough using one of my favorite recipes for oatmeal raisin cookies. Then, instead of baking it, I put it in the refrigerator. On Sunday, I baked it. And the cookies came out thick and chewy just like the ones at Val’s.

So why do all the recipes omit that step? My cookies always come out flat and wide. I have yet to see a recipe that tells you to refrigerate the dough. But I’m sure that was the trick, even though I’ve tried it only once. I’ve made other recipes where it was important to refrigerate the dough so the fat didn’t have a chance to melt before the dough had been baked enough to set the structure (can’t think of any off-hand except for pie dough).

Then again, I have known editors to edit out some of the best tips in knitting patterns for the sake of space in their magazine or book. Why? Wouldn’t you rather do something right than to do it half-right and get an okay but not stellar result?

Why? Why? Why?