Baker’s Hours

Hey there,

Thanks for the great tips for a Better Chocolate Chip Cookie!

I have a soft cookie recipe that calls for 2 cups choc chips. I decided to use callebaut couverture slabs (a mix of white, milk and dark) equaling 6 ounces. But my batch came out super greasy and undercooked at the base of each cookie (even when I baked them 10mins more than the recipe called for). I don’t know why, because when I made it with the cheaper choc chips the texture of the cookie was perfect (but obviously the flavor of the choc was lacking).

What’s causing this? Is the fat content too high with the couverture? Would increasing the flour help or should I decrease the butter?

Baking truly is a science!

Thanks, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards,
Aileen

Aileen, the problem you are experiencing is caused by the white chocolate. Unlike dark or milk chocolate, white chocolate is made up of just cocoa butter (fat), sugar, milk solids, and lecithin (a stabilizer that helps the chocolate hold it’s emulsion). Because of it’s lack of Cocoa liquor (the stuff that gives chocolate its distinctive flavor and brown color), many professionals do not consider white chocolate to be a true chocolate.

During baking, the emulsion that holds white chocolate together breaks, causing the cocoa butter to leach out, making the greasy cookie that you described. If you want to keep the white chocolate in your recipe, then I would suggest using a cheaper white chocolate with a higher lecithin content. These are known as baker’s chocolate or “non-tempering” chocolate. If you are able to find it, I would recommend Semper. I have found that it has a good balance of lecithin while having enough cocoa butter to have a nice flavor.

The higher lecithin content in non-tempering chocolate allows the manufacturers to use less cocoa butter, which makes the chocolate easier to work with, and in many cases not even require tempering before using. Hence the “Non-Tempering” name. (At the Greenbrier, we would jokingly use the slogan, “Why Temper where you can Semper.”) However, because these chocolates have less cocoa butter, they don’t taste as rich as couverture. Since you are mixing the white with dark and milk chocolates, this should not be a problem. There will be plenty of richness in your cookie from the dark and milk chocolates to compensate for the lower quality of white chocolate.

Because of white chocolate’s tendency to easily burn or break, I generally like to bake them faster than I would a dark chocolate cookie. Bake at a slightly higher temperature (350ish) for less time. Injecting a little steam into the oven at the beginning of the baking process would also help speed up the baking process. I would suggest baking your cookies at like you usually do to see if using the different chocolate works before playing around with times and temperatures, though.

Song stuck in my head at the time of this post:  Don’t Have To Think Twice by Three Plus