Choc-Chip Cookie Experiment

When it comes to stress-relief baking, my fall-back option is always choc-chip cookies. While I do love the feeling of kneading dough, there's just something so comforting about the smell of choc-chip cookies in the oven. I've been playing around with trying to make a vegan version of the Serious Eats choc-chip cookie recipe and my first goal is to replace the dairy, My first attempt was to replace the butter with Nuttelex Buttery, but add a teaspoon of coconut flour (which is just ground up coconut) to give it something to "brown". My second attempt was to use coconut oil, in the ratio of 220g oil, 5g coconut flour, to replace the butter. Oh, and I found these amazing dark choc-chips at Costco, which are not super bitter (they don't list anything dairy in the ingredients, but it does say, "May contain: milk").

I probably should have taken more photos of the process, but I didn't feel like the results were perfect (compared to the dairy version of the cookie).

The dough looked nice:

And the final cookies spread out and had that great chewy, yet crunchy texture.

MrFodder and I both preferred the Nuttelex version, rather than the coconut oil version.

But I knew more work had to be done. I was starting to get a bit sick of cookies though, and it definitely wasn't very good for my waistline - or MrFodder's! But I still had 96 cookies worth of dough in the fridge, so I figured I'd take some to work. Then I thought, why not ask the people at work which cookies were better? It's not like they hadn't done it before, with the various bake-offs we had had in the office.

So I did the same, labelled some plates, left some paper and pens, and waited.

(I forgot to take a photo at the start, but I broke the cookies into 5 pieces each, just so I could get more feedback.)

The results of the first test:

9 votes for A (the Nuttelex cookies)
5 votes for B (the coconut oil cookies)
1 vote for "NEEDS MILK"

MrFodder pointed out that people could just be voting for A since it's first. I performed a second test - same dough, slightly longer cooking time (as that was the general feedback I had received), but this time I switched the order of the plates.

The results of the second test:

6 votes for A (although one voter only got to sample A, as B had run out)
7 votes for B

Funnily enough, someone wrote on their vote, "Is this a trick? Are they both the same?".

I thought that'd be a funny experiment, but I had run out of dough by this point, so I decided to make a third batch. Some of the comments I received said that full-dairy cookies were better, so I made the recipe again, this time following the original recipe with no substitutions.

Then I broke up and laid out the cookies again like last time, except the cookies for both plates were from the same batch. I wanted a bit more data this time, so I made 24 cookies, which should have given me 60 votes.

Here are the results:

9 votes for A
9 votes for B
2 votes saying they're both the same
1 vote saying, "Got milk?" - which I actually addressed! If you read the Post-It note in the middle, it says, "There's milk in the fridge if you think the tasting experience requires it."

I guess there doesn't seem to be a bias either way towards the order of the plates.

It was funny having people come up to me and say things like, "Plate A was much better this time." And I thought there would be 60 votes, but I had some time to observe people's patterns today, and it gave some insight into why I had so many samples, but was getting so few votes back.

1) People were going back for seconds. That in itself wasn't a bad thing, as I'd get maybe half the expected votes. The problem was that people were going back for seconds in an uneven manner, and only getting seconds from one plate. Maybe since the votes were distributed fairly evenly, it might not have made a huge difference, but there was one voter who only got to sample one side of the experiment. Who knows who else only got to eat one side, but didn't bother voting as they didn't think it'd be worth it?

2) People were eating and not voting. Made me sad, but I wasn't going to stand there all day and make people vote - I do have a work to do, plus, it seems unethical!

3) I ran out of paper. Someone was resourceful and brought over a pad over Post-It notes, but I can't tell how many votes I missed because there were no pieces of paper left.

A few other observations of the whole process. Many people came up to me to ask me which plate was mine. I refused to say, claiming that they should vote based on which they thought tasted better, not who they thought had baked it. A few people asked who the other baker was, and some were convinced it was my croissant baking rival, which I felt a bit bad about, as I didn't want him to get harassed over my experiment, but he didn't say anything to me about it.

I think a people were starting to get suspicious by day 3. Obviously there were the two people who realised they were the same, but rather than being asked which plate was mine, they were starting to ask what was going on, and whether I'd laced the cookies with poison. That didn't seem to stop them from being eaten though.

My favourite part was that this morning I saw someone get out of the lift on my floor, come in, sample the cookies, vote, and then get back into the lift and return to whichever floor he was going to. I thought that was really cute. :) Though he will be disappointed tomorrow, as I don't have another experiment to run.

I plan to do waffles next Monday, if I have the time, but I haven't worked out what I'm going to test yet. I feel like a whole world of social experiments has opened up to me. And food experiments, of course. I still need to work towards the ultimate cookie.

Tangent: The whole choc-chip cookie thing started with Terry. She told me that the best cookies ever were the cookies at Subway. Back then, mum never rarely let me eat take-away, so I'd never even been to Subway, and since they were most likely dairy-cookies, I'd never had a Subway cookie. I had no way of disproving her claim, and didn't even eat choc-chip cookies anyway, so I had no frame of reference either. I just knew that in cartoons and on TV, they were usually what people pulled out of the oven, and you'd see the aroma lines, and characters would drift towards it as though it smelled so amazing it was powerful enough to pull them in.

My aspiration for so long was to make cookies just as good as Subway cookies. I have seen them many times, but I've still never had one. It wasn't until a month ago, when I told MrFodder about said aspiration and he replied, "Subway cookies are shit." that I realised maybe I should aspire for something more.