dry oatmeal raisin cookies

I made the Cooks Illustrated oatmeal raisin cookie recipe or the one from the great Simply Recipes site (looks the same to me).

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came out dry and didn't spread. I had some random thoughts but wonder if anyone has any ideas since I'm really not familiar with oatmeal raisin cookies. I used "extra thick" organic oats and not ye olde Quaker Oats. It was still 3 cups, but maybe they sucked up more moisture or something.

I had 2 baking sheets and definitely the bottom sheet spread more than the bottom. I turned on the convection oven after the first baking and it seemed to make the cookies spread a little better. I'm thinking of only doing one layer next time, but 2 might work with the convection.

Any other factors I should look out for? This recipe seems to produce good results for others, so I'm not willing to give up on it yet and assume it's something I'm doing like using the wrong oats.

Reply to
Ham Sulu
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Well, any time you change an ingredient in a recipe you can get unexpected results!

I would make the cookies exactly to the recipe the first time, then, if I wanted to change something, I would change one thing and see how that affects the final product.

Alan

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It's not that I think stupidity should be punishable by death. I just think we should take the warning labels off of everything and let the problem take care of itself.

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Reply to
Alan Moorman

I made the Cooks Illustrated oatmeal raisin cookie recipe or the one from the great Simply Recipes site.

formatting link
came out dry and didn't spread. I had some random thoughts butwonder if anyone has any ideas since I'm really not familiar withoatmeal raisin cookies. I used "extra thick" organic rolled oats and not ye olde Quaker Oats. It was still 3 cups, but maybe they sucked up more moisture or something.

I had 2 baking sheets and definitely the bottom sheet spread more than the bottom. I turned on the convection oven after the first baking and it seemed to make the cookies spread a little better. I'm thinking of only doing one layer next time, but 2 might work with the convection.

Any other factors I should look out for? This recipe seems to produce good results for others, so I'm not willing to give up on it yet and assume it's something I'm doing like using the wrong oats.

Reply to
Ham Sulu

That was my plan. The recipe said rolled oats so I bought rolled oats. I just didn't realized that "extra thick" rolled oats could be the possible death knell of these cookies.

Reply to
Ham Sulu

I don't know if they were the problem, either!

However, if they were extra thick, they might have needed to be cooked in a different way to absorb liquid.

If you still have the interest, buy some ordinary rolled oats, not instant, or anything different, and see what happens.

Who knows, perhaps the recipe is a dry one!

:-)

Alan

==

It's not that I think stupidity should be punishable by death. I just think we should take the warning labels off of everything and let the problem take care of itself.

--------------------------------------------------------

Reply to
Alan Moorman

This recipe used to be a bugger for me, too, until I changed a couple things that were being done incorrectly:

First, Cook's Illustrated recipes are fairly exhaustive and exacting, except when they specify a portion of cookie dough (or bread dough for rolls, meatball mixture, etc.) to be a certain diameter, their inches are either smaller or larger. Using their two-inch measure I would get many more cookies than the 18 I was supposed to end up with. The smaller cookies would overback in half the specified time, and I'd have dozens of excellent dog biscuits for Pavlov.

So now what I do is weigh the entire mass of finished dough in grams and divide that number by 18. With that final number I then portion out the doughballs by weight. After the first few I get a feel for how large CI actually meant for their doughballs to be before baking. Mark down some notes in your CI book for next time re: weight and size.

Second, these cookies have to come out of the oven before they look like they're done. They have to look raw in the top center of the cookie and just beginning to brown around the edges. They won't look like they'll ever firm up after cooling, but they will. During the final minute of baking this cookie gives up a lot of moisture, and overbaking will occur if you're not diligent. Ten or twenty seconds beyond and they will be dry and hard.

There's not enough milk in the house to choke one of these huge cookies down your throat if the batch turns out dry and hard. Milk isn't necessary when enjoying one properly soft and chewy, but still recommended (if you're not LI).

Best of luck.

Reply to
Plumb Loco Records

Great advice! Thanks! I think I'm ready to give it another go with standard oats and your advice. Hopefully the standard oats will take care of the not-spreading problem. I'm glad to hear that others had problems because of course on Elise's blog, everyone just raves about how great they are and not about how easy or hard it is. I know exactly what you mean about the over baking. There was this moment where I thought I should pull them out because of over baking, but, yup, the centers looked uncooked so I kept them in longer. Whoops.

Reply to
Ham Sulu

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