The Science Behind a Perfectly Browned Cookie - CHOW Tip

Jeff Potter, author of Cooking for Geeks, makes smart points about heat and baking that, if taken to heart, will undoubtedly result in the most perfect chocolate chip cookies ever. Start testing his concepts with this recipe.

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TRANSCRIPT
The most common problem I see around cooking is people not understanding that it's the temperature of the food, not the environment that matters. And by gathering some data we're going to see exactly what happens at different point with chocolate chip cookies. I'm going to put a lump of the cookie dough on the sheet here and stick a probe thermometer in it. It tells you internal temperature of things. And this guys an infrared thermometer. It tells you the surface temperature of things. Best geek toy ever. Once you put that chocolate chip cookie dough into the oven that cookie dough starts to get hotter, or course, but it's not like it just gets hotter in one linear continuous curve. It actually goes through a couple of really important discreet physical and chemical changes, first ones around 92 degrees Fahrenheit when the butter starts to actually melt. Then around 212 all the water that's present from that butter begins to steam out and set the outside of that cookie. Around 310 degrees the cookie starts to turn light brown. We want to actually have this nice brown toasted outside, in which case you have to make sure your ovens at least above 356 where that caramelization of sucrose begins to happen.