Weyauwega Butter Experiment - One Minute

Here's a cookie-baking hint you probably don't need - after you've just taken boiling water for tea off your electric stove burner and turned it off, don't immediately pull a pan of baked cookies out of the oven and set it on that burner. Luckily, heavy duty cookie pans will generally recover from such a faux pas. The cookies on them, however, may not. Not even the smoke alarm will save them. Or so I discovered today. :-)

Moving quickly on...

I figured out how I can warm butter to 68 degrees in a reasonable amount of time without chance of melting it, when the room temperature is 68. First, I cut the butter into slices about 1/4 to 1/3 inch thick. I plastered the sides of the large bowl of the mixer with the butter, squishing them a little against the side to make sure there was good contact. Then I filled the kitchen sink about 1/3 to 1/2 full of water at about 76 F. I set the bowl in the sink. Amazingly, as heavy as it is, it floats! Kind of like playing in the bathtub. :-) Anyway, the mixer bowl is on the cool side because of the cold butter on it, and that lowers the temperature of the water in the sink a bit. The water is still warm enough to keep pumping heat into the butter until it's close to the right temperature. I think it still takes maybe an hour or so to come to 68 degrees. I'll figure out just how long it takes later. The important thing, for me, is that it lets me warm the butter to 68 degrees in a room of the same temperature without it taking hours. So that's my plan for warming butter this winter, when I forget to take it out of the refrigerator before I go to work in the morning.

After work today, then, I proceeded with the first of many batches of test cookies that will vary in just one thing at a time. My first goal with these experiments is to figure out exactly how creaming affects cookies. This is my procedure:

1. Get the butter warming up from refrigerator temperature.
2. Measure 405 grams (about 2 cups) of C&H Sugar.
3. Stir 4 cups of flour in a bowl.
4. Using a spoon, measure out 2 cups of flour and place it into the rotating ring sifter.
5. Add 0.5 teaspoon baking power to the sifter on top of the flour.
6. Measure out 2 more cups of flour into the rotating ring sifter.
7. With the whisk, try to stir the flour in the sifter a bit.
8. Sift the baking soda and flour together into a separate bowl.
9. When the butter has come to 68-69 degrees, record the temperature and proceed:
10. Beat the butter in the large bowl at Level 2 for 15 seconds.
11. Beat the butter at Level 7 for 30 seconds.
12. Add sugar. Beat at Level 2 for 15 seconds.
13. Beat butter and sugar at Level 7 for the prescribed period of time.
14. 30 seconds before the end of the prescribed time, add 1 teaspoon vanilla.
15. Measure the temperature of the butter/sugar mixture at the end of the creaming period.
16. Measure the weight of one level cup of the butter/sugar mixture at the end of the creaming period.
17. Add about two cups of the flour to the butter. Mix at level 2 for 20 seconds.
18. Add the remaining two cups of flour. Working rapidly with one hand, work the flour into the dough with my hands for one minute and thirty seconds.
19. Divide the dough into several equal portions. (Three equal portions by weight is about 424 grams each).
20. Form each portion into a roll about 2 inches in diameter.
21. Refrigerate all the rolls for 2 hours.
22. 30 minutes before the 2 hours is up, turn the oven on to 350 F.
23. Slice the rolls into quarter-inch slices
24. Bake on my Wilton pan. Determine to 30 seconds how long it takes to bake to the point of crispness.
25. After the cookies are cooled, save several samples in a plastic bag in the freezer.
26. Take notes on the resulting cookies.

The butter I'm testing with right now is the Weyauwega brand butter, because it's what I've been using and I need to get back to where I was before with my butt-ugly cookies by doing everything the same, after my short excursion testing out Crystal Farms butter.

Today the "prescribed time" to cream the butter and sugar in step 13 was only one minute. When I formed the rolls, they weren't very sticky or goopy, but they didn't seem to hang together very well. It wasn't that the dough would fall apart, but it just didn't have a very solid feeling to it. I had a feeling the dough wasn't mixed well enough. When I sliced it, I found that one roll actually had holes in the center. I'm not sure how to avoid that! It's not the first time I've seen that in my rolls of dough. I'm definitely doing something wrong when I make these rolls! Maybe I should gently press the mound of dough a bit flat and then roll it up to form the rolls, instead of massing it all into a ball and then rolling it into an elongated shape. I'll try that next time.

These cookies were pretty interesting! My first expression pulling them out of the oven was, "Glory Hallelujah! I got my butt-ugly cookies back!" These cookies were wafer-thin. They were more than pockmarked - they actually had holes in them, like lacy Swiss cheese. They also spread out to an extreme degree, which probably contributes greatly to their flatness. The picture shows how close together they wound up, though initially they were about two inches apart from each other.

I'm not sure what makes cookies spread. I've heard they spread less if you add more flour, but I used the same amount of flour as in many previous batches. I'm wondering if that's another symptom of not mixing in the flour enough. Another thing is, the Wilton pan is extremely smooth. It's almost like it has an enamel finish, it's so smooth. None of my other pans are this smooth. I mentioned before that there was no name for the pan when I bought it, really just the size and manufacturer, but on the Wilton Web site it looked just like the pan they call their EasyGlide pan. The name fits with the smoothness of the finish. It is very easy to move the baked cookies on the pan as I try to get them onto a spatula. It could well be that the smoother the finish, the easier the cookies spread, especially if there is a lot of butter in them like for these cookies. However, these cookies did spread much more than any cookies I've baked previously. The big difference is that the butter was hardly creamed at all - usually I do the creaming much longer.

I'm using the Wilton pan with these tests for four reasons: 1) I wasn't that confident I had the calibration time right, and I'll be very sure of the calibration time when this is all done. 2) It's the least expensive of the pans that I thought gave pretty good results, and the only one under $10 - I think it was around $5.50. It would be good to know just how it behaves with these cookies under many conditions. 3) The pan is kind of long and narrow and fits my oven extremely nicely, with roughly equal space between the edges and the oven side panels on all sides. 4) The size is such that all the cookies from one batch fit on a single one of my largest cooling racks. The best three pans I have make too many cookies for one rack in a single batch. Obviously not a big problem if good cookies is the top priority, but for these tests I might as well make things as easy on myself as possible.

I noticed that the cookies went from white and incompletely baked to over-brown and overbaked in the space of one minute. These flat cookies were baked and somewhat brown around the edges after 7 minutes 30 seconds. I think the slight amount of time it took to go from undone to significantly overdone was due to how flat the cookies were. I think that would make the dough through the whole of the cookie change temperature rapidly as the pan rises in temperature, so literally one minute they aren't done, and the next minute they're well past. Thicker cookies take longer for the temperature to go through the entire cookie. Another major factor would be that these cookies spread out a lot, so the same amount of dough was in contact with a rather large area of the pan that would normally have been in contact with a smaller area of the pan. That meant the cookies were probably taking in more total heat than more compact cookies would have taken in.

I'm tempted to try just mixing the dough for longer, but that's really a distraction. I'll never get the effect of creaming by different amounts if I don't stick with the plan. I'll come back and test the mixing later. In the end I don't really want to mix the flour in by hand if I don't have to. I'm only doing that because I have heard it's very important not to mix the flour into the dough too long, and I have no idea how long is "too long". Also, I made cookies before Christmas and the ones I used a mixer with seemed to be pretty hard, and the ones I mixed by hand weren't at all. That wasn't the only difference in my procedure between the ones that were OK and the ones that weren't, but it was one difference. I'll figure out the mixing later, but meanwhile I'm mixing by hand because I know it can result in good cookies. However, maybe I'm simply not doing it long enough. Anyway, I described the results I got with this today, and I'll keep doing the same procedure just like this for a while so that hopefully I'll see nothing change except what's due to creaming for a longer period of time. Once I'm done with this series, I'll do abbreviated series with other things different.