Nigella Lawson shares her recipe for delicious chocolate chip cookies (2024)

FAQs

Who traded her famous cookie recipe to the Nestlé Corporation? ›

It all started back in 1939. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the successful Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, was mixing a batch of cookies when she decided to add broken pieces of Nestlé Semi-Sweet chocolate into the recipe expecting the chocolate to melt.

The caramelized butter, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, and subtle notes of salt offer a balanced flavor profile. The saltiness highlights and enhances the preexisting flavors. But what makes for the perfect chocolate chip cookie? You get what you pay for, and high-quality ingredients equate to a high-quality product.

But when you're baking, butter triumphs over margarine every time. For cakes, cookies, and pastries, butter (unsalted, that is) provides richer flavor. (It begins as cream, after all, and margarine is made from vegetable oil.) Butter's high fat content is also what gives baked goods their texture.

In 1939, Wakefield sold Nestlé the rights to reproduce her recipe on its packages (supposedly for only $1) and was hired to consult on recipes for the company, which was said to have provided her free chocolate for life.

In exchange for Wakefield offering Nestlé permission to print the recipe and market their semi-sweet chocolate as a key ingredient, Wakefield received a $1 payment for recipe rights, a lifetime supply of baking chocolate, and a consulting deal with Nestlé.

Putting a slice of fresh white bread in the container with the cookies will help the cookies stay soft: fresh bread is moist, and that slice will give up its moisture for the greater good: keeping the cookies from drying out. We recommend white bread so that no flavor is transferred to the cookies.

Baking powder is likely your best bet if you are in the mood for a light, fluffy cookie. However, when the craving hits for something chewier and denser, like chocolate chip cookies, reach for that box of baking soda to create your perfect batch.

Q: Why are my cookies so puffy and cakey? Whipping too much air into the dough. That fluffy texture you want in a cake results from beating a lot of air into the room temperature butter and sugar, and it does the same for cookies. So don't overdo it when you're creaming together the butter and sugar.

Cookies Made with Butter vs Shortening

The butter cookie provides better flavor and a crispier exterior with browning around edges and a chewy interior; the shortening cookie spreads less, holding its shape better while baking.

What happens if you use melted butter instead of softened for chocolate chip cookies? ›

Using melted butter in cookies helps you achieve a similar fudgy-yet-cooked texture and prevents any unwanted cakiness. Instead of the rise coming from both chemical and physical leavening agents (baking soda/powder + creamed butter), it now comes almost exclusively from chemical agents alone.

Overmixing — or overcreaming, in baking-speak — resulted in a runnier batter. The fluidity made for a cookie that baked quickly and spread out more widely than a properly creamed batter usually would.

As the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe became popular, sales of Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate bar increased. Andrew Nestle and Ruth Wakefield struck a deal. Nestle would print the Toll House Cookie recipe on its packaging and Ruth Wakefield would have a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate.

Wallace "Wally" Amos, Jr.

He is the founder of the Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookie, the Cookie Kahuna, and Aunt Della's Cookies gourmet cookie brands, and he was the host of the adult reading program, Learn to Read.

Nestlé gained permission to print Wakefield's recipe on the back of their packaging. In return, it was said that Wakefield received a $1 payment for rights to the recipe, all the chocolate she would need for a lifetime of baking, and a consulting deal to work with Nestlé on other recipes.