Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
Perfecting Chocolate Chip Cookies, featuring Zoë François
28 Apr 2025
Chapter 1: What are the origins of chocolate chip cookies?
Yes. And people are mad for this. It's just not necessarily my taste. But they are outrageously popular. So I may be alone in this. So anyway, I bake them. And then because I wasn't loving them, I just took a spatula and smashed them down. And the way that they set up after I did that was... was very exciting to me.
Like all of a sudden they had just the right amount of that ooey gooeyness in the center. It wasn't like this big old block of it. So I take this giant ball, I actually bake them so you get this sort of crispy outside. And then I smash them once they come out and let them set just like that. That way you get that sort of ooey gooey center.
If you put them back in the oven, they're gonna set up a little bit more. Again, Whatever your preference is, try it both ways and see which one you love.
I know our test kitchen director, Sarah, was very inspired by the technique. So she applied it to her recipe for oatmeal and date smash cookies, which you can find on the King Arthur website, as well as linked in the show notes, and which is one of my very favorite new recipes of ours.
Zoe Francois, thank you so much for being our guest here on Things Bakers Know. I want to give you the last word. If there's anything else you want to say about chocolate chip cookies...
A big tall glass of milk. That's it.
Perfect. We'll put a link to Zoe's habit forming chocolate chip smash cookies in the show notes, as well as a link to your phenomenal book, Zoe Bakes Cookies. Zoe, where else can our bakers find you?
Basically, Zoe Bakes Anywhere on Instagram, Substack, my website, Facebook. It's all Zoe Bakes.
Amazing. Great.
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Chapter 2: Why are chocolate chip cookies so popular?
No, I mean, I like, I still want my chocolate to be like, not hard, right? Like I want there to still be some like chocolate pooling. But I think the overall textural experience for me is better when cookies have had say like, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes to cool.
So they're like, you know, they're solidly room temperature on the warm side of room temperature, but they're not like a molten cookie experience. Yeah. I think what I don't like about a warm chocolate chip cookie is that there is no sort of textural contrast, right? Like it's just sort of like raw dough. You know, there's not like a distinction between the edge and the middle.
It just feels like an underdone to me in a way that I don't find appealing.
That's a good point. The edges have not had time to set up and get crispy. Right. So it's all it's sort of like all middle. All middle. Yeah. Oh, gosh. I never thought about that before. Now I'm getting a little grossed out.
Now you're getting a Jess opinion.
Don't change me because I like the way I am.
So I don't know. I mean, are we going to get hate mail? I don't know what's going to happen.
Definitely going to get hate mail. But you know what? I will defend you till the day I die. You have a right to like cookies at whatever temperature you want. And that temperature seems to be not too cold. Definitely not warm, but just right. And that's fine.
David, before we go, I want to tell you about something I learned while working on this episode. There is a chocolate chip cookie that is so special, it's in a museum.
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