high-bar baking

I’m sure I’ve said before that I love oats. I have confidence in that statement because I do love oats. But mostly because I’m a repetitive person. So I’ll say it again; oats are awesome. They might seem humble and boring, but the texture’s kind of to die for. I want some chew. 

I made Maria Lichty’s Best-Ever Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies. You had me at browned butter. (That’s what Renée Zellweger said, right? It must have been.) I was pretty skeptical, as I am across her entire book, about volume measurements of chocolate. I don’t want to use chocolate chips, and I don’t know what a “chocolate chunk” standardizes out to. How much chocolate am I supposed to chop? Here, I went with two Ghirardelli baking bars, or 8 ounces. Since it makes quite a few cookies, it seemed to be a good ratio.

The salt is perfect here, guys. Just the rights pops in all the right places. As always, I applied flakey salt like the flakey salt fairy that I am before baking, not after. For stickage and for flavour. 

She’s gotta stop calling for 3 tablespoon balls of dough, man. I have a 2T scoop and a 4T scoop. (For the curious among you, 4 tablespoons is a quarter cup. Did I blow your mind?) It’s easier to overfill a smaller scoop than underfill a big one, so I use the 2T. I’m acting salty, but it was a well-sized cookie. 

I guess, sometimes, even the people you don’t trust to do things correctly can surprise you. Sometimes the oatmeal CCC is good, and I’ve gotta get off my high horse and admit that even people who decide to cook in VOLUME can make a good cookie.

Not that I cooked with volume. I used my scale. 

Please.