Jessica Badalana
speaker
1,485 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Jessica Badalana’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
A lot of opinions. And today, for the very first episode of our very first season, we're talking about one of the greatest foods of all time, the iconic chocolate chip cookie.
Well done.
I mean, I have not eaten any today, but I think I've eaten more chocolate chip cookies in my lifetime than any other cookie and maybe even any other sweet thing, honestly. For me, they're basically the greatest of all time when it comes to cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are America's favorite cookie. They're my favorite cookie.
And frankly, I'm just glad I was born in the same century as the chocolate chip cookie. They were first popularized by Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House restaurant in Massachusetts in the early 1930s. Nestle and Pillsbury started selling refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough in the 1950s. Nabisco launched Chips Ahoy in the 1960s, and that started a packaged cookie revolution.
Shout out to famous Amos. If you know, you know. And now it's hard to find a bakery that doesn't sell a chocolate chip cookie.
No.
If you want that cookie, go now.
I know you've been on your own journey, David, trying to find the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. And I'm curious about what you might have found out there and what you've learned.
Well, you know, first of all, I'm shocked that you would order chocolate chip cookies at a restaurant. Every time.
Wow.
But you're totally right that cookies have become very extra. Like they are frosted. They have tahini in them. The butter is brown. They're giant. They have like huge pools of chocolate. Like they have more chocolate than they do batter. Lots of innovation happening. Some good.
some less good, but there's also been this like absolutely like explosive growth of these cookie chains in the last few years. And I think those cookie chains of which there are now numerous ones, they're sort of resetting chocolate chip cookie expectations because these chains are now everywhere, they're beloved and they're creating a new standard and that standard I think is big.
Super sweet cookies.
And these chains have been so hugely successful. Crumble started with one store in Utah back in 2017, and now there are over 1,000 franchise-owned Crumble stores in the U.S., 18 in Canada, 96% of which have opened since 2020. So it's not our imagination that in the last...
four years like it's been it's been crazy cookie time and those chains have generated more than a billion dollars in sales and sold 300 million cookies and you know sorry not sorry that's a lot of dough david that's a lot of cookie dough okay well the point is chocolate chip cookies never go out of fashion people never get bored with them and they're here to stay
Every episode we'll be chatting with the best bakers around. And recently I was reading best-selling cookbook author and TV host Zoe Francois' latest book, Zoe Bakes Cookies. As you might expect, it is an exhaustive and extensively researched guide to cookie baking. And part of what makes it so amazing is the deep dive that Zoe takes in every element of chocolate chip cookies.
With photos and charts, you can really sort of drill down into what a simple tweak or a seemingly simple tweak to a recipe does to the end result. So we decided to call up Zoe to talk more about chocolate chip cookies and get some of her secrets.
Zoe, did you already have those family recipes before you started writing your book?
In the book, you talk a lot about what happens if you alter one ingredient in your chocolate chip cookie dough, like if you use brown sugar instead of granulated sugar, or you swap shortening for some of the butter, or use less flour or more baking powder.
And I'm just sort of curious what it must have been like when you were testing all those variations, because I imagine it was kind of an intense process.
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