Chocolate chip cookie

Ingredients

Chocolate chip cookies typically include white sugar, brown sugar, flour, salt, eggs, a leavening agent such as baking soda, a fat like butter or shortening, vanilla extract, and chocolate pieces. Some recipes add milk or nuts such as chopped walnuts. The choice and ratio of ingredients determine whether the cookie is soft and chewy or crispy. Brown sugar is hygroscopic, absorbing moisture to produce a chewy cookie, but cookies made solely from brown sugar struggle to hold together, so white sugar is often included for crispiness.

Baking soda neutralizes the dough's acidity and promotes browning and thickness; most recipes use more than needed for neutralization, though its flavor is masked by chocolate, brown sugar, and vanilla. Eggs and shortening yield puffier cookies, while butter or added milk produce thinner ones. Flour absorbs liquid and limits spread during baking; higher-protein flours absorb more, and biochemist Shirley Corriher attributed the poor modern reputation of Toll House cookies to lower protein content in modern flour compared to Wakefield's era.

Flour's starch gelatinizes upon heating, allowing the cookie to set. For gluten-free versions, starches from corn, potato, or pea are chosen based on how similarly the dough flows to standard cookie dough.

Preparation

Most chocolate chip cookies use the creaming method, where sugar and a soft fat are whipped together, creating a light, aerated mixture as sugar crystals form bubbles in the fat. Some recipes use melted butter instead, producing smaller yields. After creaming, eggs are added one at a time with bowl scraping between additions, which reduces mixing time and yields more consistent, chewy cookies that spread less. Some recipes then let the mixture rest briefly to dissolve some sugar, which caramelizes more readily during baking, giving a slight sheen, craggy surface, and chewy center. Dry ingredients are added and mixed, then chocolate chips are folded in until combined. Baking the dough in a dish rather than on a sheet produces a chocolate chip bar cookie, also called congo bars or blondies.

History

The most common account credits Ruth Graves Wakefield with creating the chocolate chip cookie in the 1930s, though chocolate had appeared in cookies earlier in grated or melted forms, lacking discrete chocolate pieces. These earlier cookies evolved from jumbles, a drop cookie popular in the late 1800s, which bakers flavored with whatever was on hand, sometimes chocolate. By the 1870s, chocolate jumbles became a distinct form as chocolate prices dropped, and their ingredient ratios resembled modern chocolate chip cookies.

Through the 1880s and 1890s, chocolate jumbles were very popular in America. Food writer Stella Parks suggested the first chocolate chip cookies appeared then, noting that grating chocolate was slow and not everyone had a grater; she proposed that bakers took the shortcut of chopping chocolate with a knife. By the early 1900s, recipes for Chocolate Drops existed, and Parks argued the dough's stickiness prevented rolling. By 1928, chocolate chip cookies were sold commercially in Wisconsin, and by the early 1930s, supermarkets in the Midwest and northeastern US sold versions, with corporate manufacturers in Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania producing them by 1937.

Sources differ on the specific year Wakefield created her recipe, and accounts vary between accidental invention and intentional creation.

In culture

The chocolate chip cookie is closely tied to the United States, where as of the early 2010s it was the most popular cookie, especially for home baking. It is sold in supermarkets, bodegas, and bakeries, and appears in ice cream and ice cream sandwiches. For tourists from some countries, eating an American chocolate chip cookie is an important part of a trip; as of 2014, Nestlé printed recipes only in English on their chocolate chip packages to maintain that association.

Food writers have described chocolate chip cookie consumption and manufacture as gendered: in 2006, Bunny Crumpacker noted men preferring large, chewy cookies with chunks of chocolate and nuts, while Nestlé representatives identified women, especially mothers, as the primary purchasers of chocolate chips and refrigerated dough. Businesses use the cookies as marketing tools: DoubleTree hotels offer warm cookies on arrival, and Midwest Airlines baked them in flight.

The scent of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies has been used in campaigns such as Got Milk?, which released smells from bus stop billboards until complaints led to cancellation. Massachusetts designated the chocolate chip cookie its Official State Cookie in 1997, referencing Ruth Wakefield's creation at a Massachusetts inn.