mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
Food writer Meg Hourihan went on a quest for the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, and ended up with 26 recipes after just 24 hours. Instead of baking all 26 recipes separately, Hourihan simply averaged them for her mean chocolate chip cookie recipe (average = arithmetic mean, get it?). More details:
I converted all the measurements to base 10 so I could enter decimals into my spreadsheet, e.g. 6 tablespoons of butter equals .75 sticks of butter. But it wasn’t enough to just average ingredients. I also needed to account for differences in the directions. Some recipes called for cold butter, others for melted. So I averaged technique as well, taking into account various oven temperatures and recommended dough chilling times.
If you’ve ever baked, you know how precise baking needs to be. The idea of averaging a recipe struck me as both amusing and insane, and I was pretty sure the resulting cookies would be terrible. After all my calculations, I baked a batch. I had to make a few tweaks, e.g. my oven didn’t have a setting for 354.17°F so I used 355°F. But I stayed true to the math as much as possible. I didn’t check on how the cookies were doing, but simply baked them for 13.04 minutes. (I got that .04 by hesitating just a moment before opening the door after my timer went off!) And what do you know?
Check out Hourihan’s recipe (along with the full story of its creation and ultimate success), then check out Megnut, her fun food blog.
So, cooks: have you ever tried combining recipes like this? I’m thinking about doing this with a variety of split-pea soup recipes….
(Via Kottke.org.)
Comments (10)
Comment
- Follow mental_floss
My mom made the best Dutch Apple Pie when I was growing up. It had a graham cracker crust and a crumb topping.
When I figured out I could actually cook, I asked her for the recipe, but she couldn’t find it. So, I searched the internet for Dutch Apple Pie recipes, and none of them were exactly like the one she made. I took parts from three different recipes and came up with my own version, which is now the most requested dish at all of my family gatherings.
I wrote the recipe down, gave my mom a copy, and have started assembling a cookbook for my daughter, because I always tweak recipes if I make them often, and they always evolve into something slightly different than the original.
posted by Bre on 1-11-2008 at 8:11 am
I never averaged recipes for the ultimate, but pre-internet days (and subsequently), I noticed that several kinds of desserts seemed to have similar components and methods, just in different amounts. These include recipes for brownies, custards, chocolate sheet cakes(Texas sheet cake), and cheesecake.
So, I’ve decided cheesecake can be made using any combination of amounts and types of eggs, cream cheese, milk/cream, sugar, sour cream in any kind of crumb crust, bake until it sets, & it won’t hurt it.
posted by Budgie on 1-11-2008 at 8:34 am
An interesting application of the Wisdom of Crowds idea…
posted by Michelle on 1-11-2008 at 10:05 am
I have done this multiple times with amazing results. When in doubt, get the mean.
posted by Nanc on 1-11-2008 at 6:21 pm
I haven’t done it with averages, per se, but the Apple Pie I make at Thanksgiving is a recipe I made using about 10 apple pie recipes I found online and using the parts that either seemed similar or sounded like they’d work. Everyone seems to enjoy it. :)
posted by Sara on 1-11-2008 at 6:49 pm
I’ve done this many times when I like one part of a recipe and another part of a second and yet something else about a third. All are for the same similar item. I came up with a kick-ass Challah recipe that way! It pays to be adventurous in the kitchen ;-)
posted by AbbyJoy on 1-11-2008 at 8:33 pm
While I haven’t done the averaging thing with recipes, I like the idea. My wife & I will often mix & match recipes; like Budgie says above, different recipes will often share a lot of things in common, and it’s always interesting to tweak this & that to see what you get.
I’ll have to try that cookie recipe. The trouble around my house is that when cookie dough is mixed, only a portion of it actually gets baked into cookies. My wife will mix a large batch, then put balls of dough into containers & freeze them so that we can bake a fresh batch on a whim. But my teenage sons will snitch the frozen dough balls for snacks way too often.
posted by Dave on 1-11-2008 at 10:23 pm
I average a lot of thigs while baking, it usually works out fine. And as far as recipes go, I’ll usually look at about 10 different ones, take what I like from each one, throw out the rest, and add things I think will make the recipe better and more unique.
posted by Dany on 1-12-2008 at 1:26 pm
I used a different strategy when making chicken marsala — for a given amount of chicken, I used the largest listed quantity of wine, mushrooms, butter, green onions, and cream from each of 3 or 4 different sauce recipes. It was perfect.
posted by kittymama on 1-12-2008 at 8:19 pm
Comment #7 DAVE,
Maybe you guys can save those frozen cookie dough balls if you label them “dog treats” or if you don’t have a dog, “rat poison”???
BRE,SARA,AbbyJoy,DAVE,
I’d love to see your special recipes!
posted by Budgie on 1-13-2008 at 7:53 am