Let me preface this by noting that we used the same ice cream scoop to portion our cookies. The fact that they are completely different sizes would not be surprising to anyone that knows us, and which size you prefer depends entirely on your perspective. Seeing these cookies side by side on the sheet pan brought a smile to my face because they are such a clear illustration of our different approaches. I think a portion size is meant to be exact. Why use an ice cream scoop unless you are going for a consistent result? Alex doesn’t want the cookies to be too large, hence the scoop, but he will stretch the boundary as far as he can to get the largest cookie that he can portion out. Oddly, when it comes to cooking, we have the opposite approach. He likes to stick to his ratios and use a thoughtful approach to changing recipes—especially for things like his favorite chocolate chip cookies—and I like to throw things together, stretching the parameters of what makes my recipe to fit whatever I have in the pantry at any given moment. He has an incredible memory and can remember every dish we’ve ever cooked, while I am constantly reinventing the same things over again in new ways because I am a “fix it and forget it” kind of person.
The resulting cookies in both cases are perfectly delicious cookies, crisp and tender, with melting chocolate and buttery crumbs that seem to melt on your tongue. They illustrate the old adage that two chefs will take the same recipe and end up with different results. In this case, all we did was scoop and bake, and the results were still divergent and delicious.
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