Storebought cookie crunchiness

Use butter, which generally leads to crisper cookies, all things being equal. Also, you're forgetting another key ingredient, which often seems to be overlooked (see my various posts on soft, all-butter chocolate chip cookies, where I talk about this more): eggs. Mimimise egg content for crunchy cookies. Don't go crazy on the sugar either, both because a lot of sugar leads to softer, chewier results, and because sugar, being hygroscopic, makes cookies that much softer with time, as the sugar absorbs humidity in the air. (That wouldn't apply of course if you lived in Arizona)

Not many things you do will affect *crunchiness* per se. However, vigourous kneading will develop gluten in flour, increasing chewiness, Creaming butter reduces density and makes the cookie a bit drier as well.

High temperature promotes a crisp outer shell but a moister, softer middle. Low temperature makes for drier cookies at the same crispness level, with more control over how crisp the cookie is as a whole. *Very* low temperatures, however, will prevent surface caramelisation and thus lead to washed-out flavour (for most cookies - there are some special cases like meringue) along with little crisping.

One other note for crunchiness. Let your cookies sit for several days. Cookies generally become crunchier and harder with age (which is one reason storebought are usually pretty crunchy - they've been sitting around). After 3 days a cookie which started out unacceptably soft might well be quite nicely crunchy.

Do you want something that is like a nest (a disc with a hollow in it) or more like an actual shell (something with a big void in the middle that you could e.g. pipe a filling into)? Your macaroon mixture could be appropriate in either case. I will say that when I heard what you're doing my thoughts immediately gravitated towards meringues.

On Mon 24 Apr 2006 06:02:08p, Thus Spake Zarathustra, or was it Alex Rast?

Substituting rice flour or cornstarch for part of the flour will also produce a crisper cookie.

Alex, thanks for the exhaustive information. My plan is to make something similar to a pastry I used to eat in Germany, usually just called "Makronentoertchen" or, regionally, "Leipziger Lerche". If you google that you'll see lots of yummy thumbnails in the "Images" page.

The shell does have a deep void. The dough is usually rolled out and layed into small brioche-shaped tart pans.

I've made these several times and they are really good but the tart dough tends to get soft and I'm envisioning a crunchier shell. So I wanted to prebake the shells and use a recipe that results in a crunchier more cookie-like texture.

As to the filling: most recipes use a very rich butter/sugar/yolk/almond mix and then fold in the stiff eggwhite. I always ended up with a shell and filling that were too similar in texture. For the filling I'm thinking of something denser and chewier, almost like marzipan so I was thinking of using a maccaroon-like filling with the eggwhites barely beaten. Not sure if that even qualifies as a macaroon but I made a pistachio recipe once that used that approach and I ended up with very chewy cookies that actually stayed chewy.

Andrew

Is that because of the gluten? In that case, would the same effect be achieved by using a lower-gluten flour?

Thanks, Andrew

On Tue 25 Apr 2006 09:05:29a, Thus Spake Zarathustra, or was it andrew queisser?

Sorry, I have no idea, but I know it works. It's a common addition to some shortbread recipes that have a crisp texture.

also if you turn the oven off after they have finished cooking and leave them in there for a few minutes then take them out of the oven but leave on the tray untill almost cool they will crisp up really well

Tessa

You googled and only got images? Were there no recipes too?

Alex, nice answer. I was going to reply with some of these, but you had even more than I thought of.

I got plenty of recipes as well, I just wanted to point out that you can get images to get a viusual idea of what I'm trying to make so Alex would have an idea of the shape and size of these things.

Andrew