Goldberg Dan - Cookie love: more than 60 recipes and techniques for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary

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Copyright 2015 by Mindy Segal
Photographs copyright 2015 by Dan Goldberg

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60774-681-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60774-682-9

v3.1

CONTENTS

introduction

TOUGH LOVE

I AM A COOKIE NERD. I geek out about cookies. As a consequence, I never bake a recipe only onceI bake it again and again, striving to make each batch better than the last. When challenged to create a new cookie, I pour over the possibilities and sweat the details. It is not unusual for me to get to near-breakdown territory. Thats when I go to bed early. When I wake up, I know what I want the cookie to be. I probably should go easier on myself, but this internal cookie-creating drive of mine is relentless. Even with years of cookie baking behind me, I am still on a quest to discover new ideas, more efficient processes, and better outcomes. I cant help it. I love cookies.

I didnt become a cookie nerd overnight. This obsession has built up gradually over the years, unfolding into a lifelong commitment to perfecting one of my favorite things to bakeand eat.

When I was a little girl, I munched on windmills, dipped Chips Ahoy in milk, and reached for anything labeled angel food or devils food. When my mother chilled a batch of pecan-flecked dough to make her nut horns, I would sneak into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and sneak out with a chunk of dough, the cold, buttery contraband melting on my tongue. Like most parents, mine tried to limit my cookie intake, which only made me want them more. Even today, my weakness for milk chocolate Milanos is very real. I can inhale a whole stack of the glorious wafer cookies in one sitting.

Yet it wasnt until I started making cookies that this puppy love turned serious. I fell into baking partially because I needed a creative outlet. I have always lived on the right side of my brain, the artsy side. Ask anyone who has worked with me: I routinely make leaps from one idea to another, and I dont always take time to fill in the gaps explaining how I got there. My brain fires away like one big jazz riff after another, a characteristic that runs in my family. When he was young, my father was a jazz musician who played the upright bass and accordion. My brother followed my dads lead by learning to play the piano, trying to emulate greats like Count Basie. Growing up, we would go as a family to Ricks American Caf in Chicago to hear Tito Puente and Mongo Santamara. With their riffs and scatting, these Latin jazz stars were the kings of improvisation. Their brains seemed to be wired the same way as mine.

My million-ideas-a-minute brain is one of the reasons that I was perpetually grounded while growing up. Stuck at home, I found my way into the kitchen. Everything about cooking fascinated me. My mother probably felt that my interest in all things kitchen related could be a way to harness my boundless energy and keep me out of trouble. So for Hanukkah when I was thirteen, my parents bestowed a KitchenAid mixer on me. Immediately, this new powerful piece of equipment became my instrument of choice. While my brother practiced the piano, I performed solo in the kitchen, one off-the-cuff baking project after another.

Cookies were prime territory for experimentation. Their malleable dough gave me plenty of options for shaping and portioning. They were also sturdy and forgiving in a way that delicate genoise cakes were not. As I worked away, I never read recipes. I am dyslexic. Reading while baking has always been challenging for me. To compensate, I would look at the list of ingredients in a book, glance at the picture, and crank up the mixer. Its a funny thing. People think of pastry chefs as sticklers for rules and scienceand rules and science are good. Yet while I was teaching myself how to bake, I unintentionally broke a lot of rules. In the process, I learned the things that really mattered.

After high school, I instinctively knew that the kitchen was where I was destined to spend my career, but in those days, college had to come first. So I headed north to Madison to attend the University of Wisconsin. But rather than get into campus life I cooked. My old roommate, Diana Dahlan earlier riser than me in those daysstill remembers how I would crawl out of bed to make her breakfast (bagel sandwiches were my specialty)and then head back to bed. But friends like Diana aside, I felt completely out of place. One day while walking to campus, I saw a bus that was leaving for Chicago. It seemed to have a magnetic pull on my body, and before my brain had quite computed what had happened, I had put myself on the bus. When my parents came home that night, they found me sitting in the living room.

What are you doing? they asked. I said I was done with college. I was going to go to culinary school. They looked at me. They looked at each other. And then they shrugged, accepting the inevitable. Okay. That weekend, we went to Madison to pack up my belongings. Soon after, I was enrolled in the culinary arts program at Kendall College.

My whole life I had cooked, but I didnt know why you made certain things in certain ways. At school, I wanted to fill in my gaps of knowledge and learn the technique that lay behind the recipes. These were the early years of Chicagos culinary renaissance. After graduating from Kendall, I trained under Judy Contino, the pastry chef at Ambria, which was one of Chicagos best restaurants at the time. Judy taught me discipline and gave me a foundation in pastryand to this day I am eternally grateful to her for mentoring me. At Ambria, Judy showed me how to make pte choux, pie dough, cakes, custardand so much more. Her formula for hot fudge is still the one I rely upon today. She also makes some of the best thumbprint cookies in town at her bakery, Bittersweet. I continued to hone my craft under chefs such as Charlie Trotter and Erwin Dreschler, learning more as I went. Meanwhile, as I started to develop my own style, childhood memories and nostalgia began to play prominent roles in my creations. With this angle, cookies became incredibly important. Everybody has a cookie memory, whether it comes from Grandma, Nabisco, the neighbor down the street, or your grade-school bake sale. My goal thenand nowhas been to take the ordinary cookie memory and make it extraordinary.

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