A few weeks ago my coworker Jule interviewed me about why I like to bake, and the question turned to cookies:

JULE: Chocolate chip cookie: recipe on the Tollhouse bag or something more sinister?

WAM: A bag of mix, one clover, and one bee. I rarely make cookies from scratch. I like the Tollhouse recipe but usually I’m missing something basic like brown sugar or vanilla, and then I go to buy vanilla and there’s no vanilla left. Ridiculous. On Tuesday I had to buy cinnamon for pumpkin pie, and there was ONE container of cinnamon on the shelf, and it was huge. So now I have enough cinnamon to last until 2012.

Since then I’ve acquired a bottle of vanilla and I’ve been making an effort to truly grok the chocolate chip cookie, America’s Test Kitchen-style. I started by following the Toll House recipe to the letter every 2-3 days for a week. (Well, almost to the letter: I don’t like nuts.)  The results have been excellent and have brought small measures of joy into my coworkers’ lives, and large measures of unbaked cookie dough into my face.

Next week I’m going to try some limited variations on the Tollhouse standard. What makes a cookie chewier? Sweeter? Thinner or thicker? Then on to some fringe stuff, like pushing the chocolate content way beyond a reasonable limit. Both popular versions of the story hold that the first chocolate chip cookies were created by accident. In the one I always heard, the creator had expected the chocolate chips to melt and dissolve into the cookie batter. I believe I can cause that to happen.

At the very least, I want to follow in Jule’s footsteps toward cookie perfection, trying out different kinds of chocolate, adding sea salt, and maybe even changing up the butter if I can find some kind of high quality butter. One of my previous experiments was with homemade peanut butter cups, and trying different varieties of chocolate did yield a measurable improvement: the bittersweet peanut butter cups disappeared twice as fast as the semisweet variation.

The quest may lead back to the available ingredients and the Tollhouse recipe, as Jule found out. At least I’ll learn something about baking fundamentals. If do find a “more sinister” recipe, though, I’ll mention it here.

I’m also taking suggestions.