Weyauwega Butter Experiment - Three Minutes

Tonight I made the cookies with a 3-minute creaming period. The cookies look pretty much like the ones with a 2-minute creaming period, which would make sense because not much extra air was whipped into the dough while creaming the extra minute.

I noticed a couple of things, though, which I'll describe.

First, this dough again seemed very sloppy, like it wasn't adhering very well. It's like the dough organized itself into chunks. Within a chunk the flour and butter formed a cohesive whole, but the chunks didn't adhere to each other very well. Forming them into rolls, then, was like trying to keep a group of unruly children in line.

This is pretty much the same thing I saw with the 1-minute creaming time dough, but not so much with the 2-minute creaming time dough. It doesn't seem to be related to how long the butter was creamed, then. It may well have to do with how well the dough is mixed, with inadequate mixing resulting in this undesirable quality of the dough. On the other hand, I thought I did about the same thing all three times. Perhaps I didn't, but I'd be hard put to it to describe something I did different while mixing. There was one distinct difference between the procedure with the 2-minute dough versus the 1-minute and 3-minute dough, though. The 2-minute dough started with butter that was at almost 71 degrees, while the dough today and two days ago started with butter that was between 68 and 69 degrees F. It's not much temperature difference, but I did notice a difference in creaming, and maybe the temperature also affects how self-adhesive the dough is, or how easily it mixes, or something like that.

When I say that forming the rolls didn't work very well, I am talking about:

- it was difficult to roll the cylinders of dough without them breaking apart
- there were large holes in the centers of the cookie rounds when I cut them.

The photo on the lower left shows the holes in the centers that I am talking about. Next time I have dough that feels like this, I will cut a roll in half immediately after I roll it to see if there is air in the middle, and if not then I'll see if one has developed after it is refrigerated. Right now I just can't tell whether the hole in the center of the rolls develops while I roll the dough, or while it sits in the refrigerator. You can see how oblong some of the rounds are. The rolls are quite round when I put them in the refrigerator, and it's the simple weight of the dough that deforms them while they cool in the refrigerator. Possibly it's the deformation that causes the holes, which are really cracks in the dough, to form.

The reason one should not mix dough too long is, as I understand it, that gluten forms long strands in the dough, and too many of those interconnecting strands make the cookies hard. Another way of looking at it is that gluten strands hold the dough together more tightly as you mix longer. This dough is not holding together tightly enough, and I think that's why the holes form. It follows that if I mixed the dough longer or better, the holes would not form. However, as I said yesterday, the holes disappear as the cookie spreads due to heat, so I am not going to modify my procedure. I will continue to do the procedure I detailed yesterday. Because the holes were significantly reduced in the dough I mixed yesterday for the 2-minute creaming period cookies, it may be that 71-degree butter is enough warmer that it helps reduce the hole effect, too. I will see if I can draw a conclusion on that as I make further similar batches of cookies.

The photo on the right illustrates today's cookies baked for 7 minutes (left) and 7.5 minutes (right). The difference between the two pairs shown is a mere thirty seconds of baking! I have seen this before, but today it struck me how much difference thirty seconds can make with these cookies. The cookies on the left of the photo were just crispy, with a few of the cookies on the pan not quite there yet, while the ones on the right were nicely crispy. The calibration point today was probably at about 7.2 minutes, if I was timing in such fine gradations. It is apparently just after the cookies reach the point of crispiness that the unattractive holes or pockmarks develop in the cookies. We can see that the spreading has already taken place in the 7-minute cookies - both pairs of cookies are about the same size - so it's not spreading per se that causes the holes. However, the cookies are again quite flat and wafer-like due to the spreading, and the flatness may make the heat have a greater effect once the cookies reach a certain temperature. I mentioned before that when I take the cookies out of the oven, I can see butter bubbling in the holes for a moment as I first put them on the stove top to begin to cool, and maybe it's the mechanical force of bubbling butter that collapses the dough. When you think about it, if the butter gets so hot that it is bubbling, what is there to hold the flour in place, i.e. what is there to keep it from collapsing? Another way to look at it is, if the butter is bubbling in the cookie, perhaps there is too great a quantity of butter in one place with insufficient flour in that particular spot to keep it dispersed and protect it a little from the heat, so maybe again it's inadequate mixing of the flour into the dough that ultimately causes the holes. However, they only appear when the cookie spreads too much.

Tomorrow I will continue with this drawn-out series of cookie batches, but in my post I will go back and talk about something I tried a week or so ago.