I'm not sure about chewy, frankly: as a Brit, I like a bit of crunch to the edges of my cookie, which means allowing a little bit of spread in order to give a slightly thinner result. Intriguingly, however, American culinary celebrity Alton Brown and Marcus Wareing both use strong bread flour instead – with Jacques Torres, aka "Mr Chocolate", using a mixture of strong bread and fine cake flour in the recipe for his chain of American patisseries.īoth bread and cake flour, according to McGee on Food and Cooking "produce doughs and batters that spread less" – giving a puffier, chewier result which, in Wareing's case, even verges on the crumbly. The Toll House, Claire Clark, Great British Bake Off 2010 winner Edd Kimber and pastry god David Lebovitz all use plain flour in their cookies. Marcus Wareing recipe chocolate chip cookies. Think of the difference between the puzzlingly named Rich Tea, and a double doozie or a snickerdoodle: the Puritans clearly left their recipe books behind when they fled these shores. American cookies, meanwhile, tend to be richer and softer than our biscuits. In much of the world the biscuit follows the Oxford Companion to Food's definition of something "small in size, thin, and short or crisp in texture" while in North America it closely resembles a British scone. We don't go in for cookies much in the UK and it's not just a linguistic difference, but a practical one. It was dear Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, who came up with the brilliant idea of adding chocolate to her butter cookies some time in the 1930s. But while we've created some fine examples in our time (the wholesome fig roll, the posh viscount, even the garish pink wafer), it's America, birthplace of the awful whoopie pie and the downright evil red velvet cake, which takes the gold medal in this arena, for inventing the chocolate chip cookie. I'm proud of the fact that, according to a recent radio programme, we Brits are "one of the word's biggest spenders when it comes to biscuits. I'm a patriot about baked goods, soldiering bravely along in the belief that the British rule the waves at teatime.
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