Episode: 2119
Title: HPR2119: Making Chocolate Chip Cookies
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2119/hpr2119.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:34:44

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This is HPR episode 2,119 entitled Making Chocolate Chip Cookies and is part of the series
cooking.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 41 minutes long.
The summary is, listen live and I make a batch of really tasty chocolate chip cookies.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15 that's HPR15.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette, Louisiana, and today what we're going
to be doing is making chocolate chip cookies.
I think that's something everybody can get on board with, don't you?
So I meant to do this episode once before, and I don't know, I got halfway through and
realized that I probably should have started.
And then today I almost made the same mistake, where's my case?
Trying to find the case for the recorder, so it doesn't accidentally get turned off.
Where did I put it?
It's got to be fascinating listening right now.
Looking around for the case, from my zoom recorder, oh here it is.
Okay, so I'm going to put the case around the zoom and then put the zoom in my pocket and
get the lapel mic clipped to my shirt.
Now I'm good to go.
Okay, so anyway, I've been making chocolate chip cookies most Sunday afternoons because
the kids like to have a cookie in their lunch.
And I like making these cookies.
The variant of cookie that I'm making today is one, I'll tell you about a little bit, maybe
as we go on.
I've already done a little bit of the recipe because I kind of, I got started before I remembered
that I wanted to do an episode about this.
So I've done the very first part already, which is to cream the butter in both sugars,
which is like the first thing you do on just about any cookie project here.
And these are called the $250 cookies and I got this recipe a long time ago.
I was doing kind of an editing project for some publisher, somewhere, I don't remember
where they were.
Stack Vaughn as the publisher, but the editor that I was dealing with one day sent me an
email.
It was a forwarded email with this story that might be apocryphal, I don't really know.
But the story was about a woman who went to Neman Marcus and had some delicious cookies
and asked the waiters if she could have the recipe for the cookies.
And the waiters came back a while later with the recipe and also with the bill.
And the bill apparently was $250 for the recipe.
Well, this so outraged the woman that she decided to share the recipe with the entire world.
And that's how I got it on this chain email.
It just so happens that I don't know if that's true or not, doesn't really matter to me.
These are delicious cookies.
So I'm just going to eat them because I like them.
Now a couple of things about the tools I'm using here.
I used to make these cookies years ago in graduate school before I had very good equipment.
I think I might have had a hand mixer and that was good enough to cream the butter and
sugars.
I started adding the dry ingredients, it didn't really stand up to, it just wasn't powerful
enough.
Probably three or four years ago, I bought my wife the KitchenAid Artisan Mixing Bowl.
Like it's a big powerful mixer on a stand, runs into several hundred dollars.
I got a bargain at just over three hundred dollars, like a significant discount.
So it's a pricey thing and at first she was like, you know, I don't know if you should
spend that kind of money on this thing.
Maybe we shouldn't do that, but I did it anyway and we've never been sorry.
This thing is so amazing.
I took a picture a while ago and I'll post that along with the episode.
But this mixer makes it so that it's super easy to make these cookies.
It is so powerful and mixes everything so perfectly that I can whip up a batch of these
pretty darn quick.
Okay, I think I'm going to preheat the oven.
I use a to bake these.
I don't use our big oven because it's kind of, it's got some squirrely things regarding
temperature.
And so I think I'm going to use the toaster oven, which is actually a pretty nice toaster
oven too.
It's a cuisine art total touch and it does very accurate, very accurate temperatures.
I need to choose pizza bake and then temperature and then hit the up arrow until it gets to
375 degrees Fahrenheit and then start.
Okay, so it's going to start preheating.
So I've added one stick of butter and then half a cup of vegetable shortening.
Crisco is the branding and one of the cool things about using the crisco is you get to
use the water displacement method to measure it.
I mean, when you scoop it out with a spoon, it's just a big gobb and so the only way to
measure it accurately is to put a known quantity of water into a measuring cup.
Get a bunch of this stuff on a spoon and then dunk it in the water until it displaces
enough to bring it up.
So I put two and a half cups of water in that liquid measuring cup and then scoop out
a bunch of crisco and dunk it in there and when it's enough where the water reads three
cups, then I know I've got the right amount and I put it in there and mix it up.
So I have mixed the butter and the white sugar and the brown sugar.
Next thing to do is put in two eggs and one teaspoon of vanilla.
Get out some measuring utensils here.
Okay, there's the one teaspoon there it is.
I think this is probably imitation vanilla extract.
I don't know if we use the real thing or not, is it?
Oh, it's actually, it's actually pure vanilla extract.
Oh, fancy.
And measuring out one American teaspoon, dump it in.
I'll get a bowl to put the jockey spoon in.
And then I need two eggs.
I'm going to fridge and get out a couple of eggs.
We have, yeah, it looks like we got some, my wife had some kind of incident earlier today
where she was making a frittata and had already cracked like seven eggs and the eighth one
that she put in there was bad and didn't realize it until it had already gone in with
all the other she had, so she had to dump all of them, it was very upsetting.
These look like they're probably going to be fine and I crack the eggs into a little
bowl so that if I get little bits of shell in there, they don't go all the way into the
mix.
It makes it harder to fish them out.
One egg.
I'm not very good at the egg part, I'll just crush the shell.
But I don't think any little bits went in there sweet, okay.
Yeah, I think I'm good, so I'm just going to dump them in to the bowl.
The KitchenAid Artisan mixer has a large stainless steel bowl and the mixing mechanism
is really, really cool, so not only does it, it's got one kind of, one place to stick
a mixer thing and if you use one of the electric hand mixers, normally you've got two whisk
kind of things that spin around and go in between each other, well this only has one
and it spins around on its axis but it also does this kind of elliptical movement where
the entire unit is going around in a circle while it's spinning in place.
Oops, I've already got it preheated and so it mixes things very, very thoroughly.
So I'm going to turn it on now to mix in the eggs and the vanilla.
See what's a nice thing about this kind of mixer too is you can walk away from it while
it's mixing, you don't have to stand there holding it, you can either mix the dry ingredients,
that looks good.
Now mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl.
Just occurred to me, this white bowl that I always use to mix the dry ingredients is the
bowl that came with my mom's first mixer that she got when my mom and dad were first married,
they made an investment similarly and got one of these big mix, I don't know if it was
the same brand but it was quite a lot of money for a young married couple at the time
but my mom used it so much that they, and I think she used it for 35 years or something
and then gave it off to me and it finally gave up the ghost but I still have the bowls that
went with it.
So I'm going to do the white flour first, recipes, two cups of flour, I'm using American
measurements here, I don't know the number of grams or whatever, I'm going to post the
recipe in the show notes and so if you want to try it out and you live in Europe then
I guess you'll have to figure out the conversions, I'm not going to do that, but I think it's not
too hard to do.
One cup and two cups.
And what's next, a teaspoon of baking soda, and a teaspoon of baking powder, and that's
what these things do, I just know that every cookie recipe needs them, I've got to rinse
off the teaspoon measuring spoon and then dry it, let's do the baking soda first.
Okay, and now a teaspoon of baking powder, and very importantly do not forget the salt,
the cookie will taste bad if you don't put the salt in it.
So if I put this salt container, this one's just about empty, I wonder if there's enough
in there.
I've got another one, but it looks like I'm going to have to open it, yeah that's pretty
much empty.
I do have another one right, oh there it is, it's way up on the shelf.
Okay, I can see over there that my wife is planning tomorrow to make me a big pot of
red beans and sausage, like Cajun sausage and red beans, I can't wait stoked about that.
This is open here, it's hard to get open.
Okay, there it's open, I'm going to pour some salt in this little bowl and I can use
that same bowl of salt when I make my steel cut oats, I think I might make a batch of
steel cut oats for breakfast tomorrow.
How much salt does this, one half teaspoon of salt, okay there goes a half teaspoon of
salt, what else, teaspoon of soda, teaspoon of baking powder, two cups of flour, half
teaspoon of salt, okay so the next thing to put in there is the secret ingredient that
makes it taste a little bit different from a lot of other chocolate chip cookies and
that is two and a half cups of blended oatmeal.
What I'm going to do is pour in that you measure it, but that means two and a half cups before
it's been blended. I use a cuisine art food processor to do the blending bit here.
I measure out two and a half cups of rolled oats into this thing,
one cup, two and of course since this is oatmeal in there that means the cookie is very
healthy doesn't it? Let's say yes, that way we can eat lots of them and not ever gain any
weight or be unhealthy, okay so there's two and a half cups of oatmeal in the hopper,
if that's what that thing's called, I'll put the lid on the food processor and I'm going to turn it
on. Let it go for a minute, walk over here to the side room because that's kind of noisy.
There's a mosquito in the kitchen, I think it just bit me on my ankle.
Let's check the consistency. Ooh, looks lovely. It's a nice oat flour now.
Get the blade out of there. I'll put the blade over here to wash it later and just put it in the dish
washer. I think I'm going to mix up these other dry ingredients thoroughly before I put the
oatmeal in there. The main thing is to use a whisk for this and the main thing we want to do is make
sure that all of the small quantity ingredients like the salt and the baking soda and baking powder
get mixed in thoroughly. So I'm mixing that with a whisk now. Spread it all around nice and evenly.
Okay that's good and now let's dump the the blended oatmeal in there with the white ingredients
whisk that around. It's this part of the cookie making process that used to be extremely
difficult before I had this like awesome mixer. I remember a few times doing the entire process
of folding in the dry ingredients in with the wet one using like a big spoon and that worked.
I mean I made the cookies but man that was hard. Once you get past a certain point it feels like
there's no way I could possibly mix in any more of this dry ingredients here and get it thoroughly
combined but you have to. There's still a lot more left and I managed to do it but man it was
really hard. This mixer makes it so easy so I like that. I'm putting away some ingredients now
just get them out of the way. All right so I'm going to tip this thing back a little bit and
start pouring dry ingredients into the bowl. All right there's probably a third of the dry
ingredients in there now. Start on a very low speed because if I turn the thing on really high
immediately then it blows this powdery stuff all over the kitchen. So I'm going to start on a low
speed and let it do its thing. Now I'll turn it up a little higher. Beauty. Okay add some more dry
ingredients and start on low again.
Okay now let's put the last bit in. I used to have to do this in about seven or eight stages when
I was using a spoon but now I can do it in three. I could probably even just put all of it in
there and do it all at once but I do it in stages anyway. Love the kitchen aid artisan mixer.
If you do any amount of baking of this kind and don't have one of these things I'd really
highly recommend it. If it's at all feasible in your budget I realize it's an expensive piece of
kit but man it's so great. I just put it up to level four and it's got six more levels to go
if I want to get it really fast but there's no need. Okay so the dry ingredients are all mixed
in. The last thing to put in there is chocolate chips. I put in one cup of chocolate chips.
These are nicely told how semi-sweet morsels.
Oh one of those chocolate chips fell on the counter. I'm going to have to eat down.
I'm not terrible in that happen. Okay I'm going to put the chocolate chips in this.
This is probably going to jump a little bit now with the chips in there.
I probably had to just fold the chips in there with a big spoon or something but I always use
the mixer anyway. Get them mixed in there really good. Okay the batter it's cookie dough is all mixed
up ready to go. Now of critical importance is tasting it. So I'm going to try to get all the dough
to come off the mixing blade. That's stuck because it's pretty stiff now.
Anybody who makes cookies knows that one of the great pleasures of doing it is getting to eat
just a little bit of raw cookie dough. People say that this might not be the healthiest thing to do
with the raw eggs in there but I've done it my entire life and I've never gotten sick from it
unless I just ate too much. So here it goes.
Oh that's good.
That's a ticket right there.
I'm going to detach the blade thing.
I might have to lick a little bit of that off there too. That would be terrible.
You can see the sacrifices I make for my kids.
Not every dad would be willing to go through these trials and tribulation
so that their kids will have cookies in their lunch.
Okay that's enough.
Now if you touch the bowl from the base and move the mixer back toward the back so I got a
little room to put the cookie sheet. I've lined the cookie sheet for the toaster oven with some
paper parchment stuff to keep it from sticking. I'm going to use a what size is this one inch?
Does it even say what size is it? I'm using a little baller thing so it's got a circular ball.
You scoop stuff out and it makes a nice ball and it's got this piece of metal in the middle
that swirls all the way around it to eject the ball out of the thing once you've done it.
This is what I use to make the dropped cookies. This pan holds nine. There's one, two,
nice because it makes a uniform size every time. Three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, and nine. All right let's put the cookies in the oven and set the timer
for 11 minutes. And normally while that first batch is cooking excuse me I do a little bit of clean up.
Might be fun. Fun to let me clean things up on HPR. How could that possibly be born?
You put that in that bowl in the dishwasher. This one in the dishwasher.
Maybe I could do an episode on how to load the dishwasher or maybe that's like a bonus episode
that I'm doing right now as we speak. The cookies part and also how to load the dishwasher.
Actually I'm not going to tell you how I'm just going to do it.
Find that people all have their own ways of loading a dishwasher. You're visiting
somebody and you want to help them clean up the kitchen. Sometimes you end up causing
consternation because you don't do the dishwasher exactly how they like and then they have to redo
everything. I'm not that I would ever do that when somebody was trying to help me but
I've known it to happen.
Rinse off a little bit.
Now what to talk about while the cookies are baking. I plan to carry this all the way through
to when I get the cookie out and take a bite out of it. I don't know what I could do. I could get
a cup of coffee to go with. Go with the cookies. Rinse that blade off a little bit.
I wonder what kind of cookies you guys like to make out there. Maybe you could do an episode
of how to make your favorite kind of cookie. I love chocolate chip cookies. I mean I don't
see how anybody could ever get tired of these things. It's tempting while that first batch is
cooking. It's tempting to have another scoop of the cookie dough but I think I'm not going to do that.
I think I might regret it if I did that. What I'm going to do instead is get me a cup of coffee
ready because as everybody knows a cookie by itself is great but if you've got a bit of coffee with
it that's even better. This is coffee from this morning that I keep in the thermos. I'll probably
have to warm it up a little. It stays kind of warm in the thermos but not as hot as it needs to
be. Nuke it in the microwave.
Seven and a half minutes left.
Cleaning the dry measuring cups now. These dry measuring cups are excellent. They're made by
William Sonoma and these were gifted. I don't know if they were wedding gift or what but they're so
great. A lot of times dry measuring cups are either plastic or really thin. These have an amazing
build quality that very heavy stainless steel cups. Like one of these cups weighs almost as much
as the whole set of those cups often does. They're awesome.
Not sure what else I could talk about at this point.
The coffee is heated up. I'm going to add just a little bit of milk.
Daish.
So I usually do this activity on Sunday afternoons because at this part of the afternoon is when
my wife and daughter go out to volunteer at the local no-kill animal shelter, and daughter
is really into cats, and so she goes out there and volunteers to clean out the kitty litter,
sweep things, mop the floors, give cats medicine, do all kinds of things she loves doing, and
it's nice to do that kind of volunteer work, but it's just me and my son in the house,
and he's usually reading his book at this hour, and so it's a nice time for me, normally,
so I would be doing right now, instead of talking to you, is listening to podcasts, catching
up on the bug gast, or HPR, or whatever, that I've gotten my cue, but today I'm talking
to you while the cookies bake. I can see them in there, maybe I'll take a picture, that
I'll get me something to do. They're clearly baking, but they're not as flat as they're
going to get eventually. Still got five minutes left, I'll take a picture of the cookie
dev also, end of the scooper, position it just so. Okay, man, it's going to be a thrilling
slide show to look at with these cookies. I can get the cooling rack ready. Whenever I take
the cookies out, I like to put them on a cooling rack right away, that way they can cool off,
but I can use the, I've only got one tray that goes in this cuisine art toaster oven. As
toaster ovens go, this is a pretty large one. It's exactly square in the interior, so it
holds a pretty good size pan, and it's, when I was looking for a new toaster oven, I went
with the highest customer review ratings, and so I ended up spending a good bit more money
than I thought I would at first, but we've been really, really happy with this, because I,
I mean, you can bake real things in there, like you could bake a full-size pie in there,
probably. I don't know if we've ever done that or not, but when the large oven is acting
up in terms of temperature, then I know I can rely on this one. So, we've got the cooling
rack out now. I think I'll take a picture once I have the cookies on the rack, that'll make
a nicer picture than just the rack I'll buy itself. Three minutes left. Well, after a little
apparent crisis in terms of HPR shows, it seems like the crisis has been averted, at least,
for the moment, and there are enough shows in the cuper a couple of weeks. I remember
last week thinking that I might, I should have recorded the episode about the cookies and
posted it immediately, because there was a slot coming right up that was empty, and it
seems to have gotten filled. So, that's good. Two and a half minutes. By the way, the red beans
that my wife's going to cook for me, what she does here, she soaks, I guess, a pound
of these red beans all night long in water. Oh, no, that, you know what that means, though.
She's using the crock pot for this, so that means I can't do my steel cut oats. I guess
I won't do that after all, because I need the crock pot for the steel cut oats. Oh, well,
I'll do that the next day. It makes a huge mess of beans down here in South Louisiana. People
really like beans and caged and sausage, served over white rice, delicious. Great thing
about that also is you can make a big pot of it and then eat it for the next five days,
just as leftover. It's pity that the kids don't like it, though. Somehow they've got
an aversion to beans of any sort. Pity. All right, how you'll do it in there? About a minute
and 15 seconds left. Don't worry, I'm not going to keep recording while I do all six
trays of these that I have to do. We'll just do one tray and then call it done. So now I've
retrieved the oven mitts from the other side of the kitchen, ready to pull the hot tray
of cookies out. I'm going to put the eggs away also. Don't leave the eggs out or else they're
all going to be bad, just like that one earlier. Thirty seconds. I might even need to let them
bake a little bit longer. I had one tray last Sunday that was a little bit too burnt on
the bottom. I still ate them and everything, but I like them to be just a little bit chewy
and a little bit not chewy. A little crispy on the outside and a little bit chewy on the inside.
Ten seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. Okay, pull the cookies out. When I set them down in
the counter, they kind of collapse a little bit. They look like they might need a little bit longer.
I think I'm going to put them in for another minute or so. The first batch seems like the first
batch always needs a little bit longer than the succeeding ones. I'm going to let it go another 30 seconds or so.
I thought about having some background music going on while I was doing this, but then I remembered
well, if it's background music that is under copyright, then Ken might not like that very much. So I
decided not to have any background music going on. I guess I could have had a gemendo or something playing
CC licensed music in the background, but I just didn't have the energy to go set it all up. Okay,
I'm going to pull them out for a while now. Okay, first I'm going to take a picture of them. Oh, don't they look
lovely, knowing delicious cookies. Okay, now time to put them on the cooling rack. Gotta be a little bit careful
with them at this stage because they're tiny bit delicate and they could fall right in half if you're not
careful.
right
Cookies are on the rack and then I'm going to take another picture.
And now I think I'm going to put one on a plate and eat it.
It's going to be really hot, but a little cool enough.
I'm going to eat it live on the recording.
They'll sip it off.
You know what I'm going to do?
We're going to let that cool for just a minute.
Get the next tray in the oven and then eat the cookie.
So one, we're scooping again.
Two, three, one, four, five,
I think what I'm probably going to do apart from this makes enough cookies to get through the week easily.
Even if I have one or two after lunch every day and the kids have one in their lunches every day.
And I can be a hero to my two administrative assistants at work if I bring them cookies as well.
That seems like a good idea, doesn't it?
I got to keep them happy because they work very, very hard for me.
Okay, so the next batch is in the oven. The timer is set.
I'm going to eat this cookie.
It's still warm in my hand.
Come on.
There's nothing like a fresh chocolate chip cookie right out of the oven.
I promise I'm not trying to make you all jealous or anything.
I'm going to make this one inspired you to go make a batch of cookies yourself.
I'll put the recipe in the show notes and if you want to try these very cookies yourself, you might do so.
I'm going to take one to my son also.
He likes to have one for a shallot.
You're perfect.
Do you want a cookie?
Fresh audio? No?
Go for it.
There you go.
He paused only for a second and then grabbed it.
All right.
I hope you guys have enjoyed hearing me make cookies and then stuff my face with him.
This has been John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana for Hacker Public Radio.
Talk to you guys later.
Bye.
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