Incrementally Better Cookies | Hacker News Reader

Incrementally Better Cookies

mikewest.github.io

20 pointsdedalus12 comments

Based on the title, I was expecting an equally nerdy take on incremental improvements to the classic cookie recipe, along the lines of this great article by Kenji Lopez-Alt: https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best...

I was rooting for an update on Google Brain's Gaussian process-designed chocolate chip cookies. Alas! It is some HTTP thing I personally don't care about. :(

Same here, I was excited to open up the link in case it was, and disapointed when I saw it was about digital cookies. Oh well.

Perhaps you should submit the link you mentioned tomorrow, I will upvote it if I see it.

Me too, and I was looking forward to it.

When I have time, I want to experiment with doing a sort of gradient descent on an array of different cookie recipes to find the best ratios of ingredients. That would be an interesting project.

You would have to constrain your experiment to some definition of "cookie" to prevent it from converging on a "cookie" that is pure dark chocolate.

You'd have to get there through gradient descent, though. A pile of dark-chocolate chips is quite good, but a "cookie" that is a pile of chips baked with a small but nonzero amount of butter, flour, and baking soda... isn't. Gradient descent would have trouble with getting you through that, because cutting out the baking only makes it worse, and cutting out the other ingredients without cutting out the baking _also_ only makes it worse, and reducing the amounts of everything that isn't chocolate without bringing them to zero _still_ only makes it worse.

Instead of gradient descent, I should have said the shotgun method. I imagine giving out a few cookies of varying quantities of ingredients to neighbors and then choosing the best. Though, this method does lead to potential local maxima.

In case anyone isn't familiar with these cookies...they are ridiculously good cookies.

They are useful for impressing people but they are dangerous. If you give them to people they will expect more. You will forever be the chocolate chip cookie person.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282246

Well I too was hoping for cookie iteration, mostly because that's been one of my side hobbies for a while.

I don't have Food Lab style process shots posted anywhere because this took me a decade of fussing over dozens of iterations, but I do have my current recipe here:

http://devansdesign.com/personal#/cookies/

It starts off with "The egg sets the baseline unit for all other ingredients; 1 egg mass = 1 unit." and

    1   egg
    2   white sugar
    3   brown sugar
    4   AP flour
    e   unsalted butter  [2.72]
    π   chocolate chips  [3.14]

but then it continues on with this usage of absolute volume measurements:

    1/2 tsp baking soda
    3/4 tsp kosher salt
    1   tsp vanilla extract*

Is it really true that cookies made with hummingbird eggs need a much larger portion of those ingredients than cookies make with ostrich eggs?

I'll concede the point on relative vs absolute units (poor geek form) with practical caveats:

- the preamble clearly calls out the FDA std ~50g large chicken egg as the nominal egg unit.

- the recipe targets home bakers with basic equipment and small batches.

I've converted the small volume measures into mass & egg-ratios in the past, but the numbers butt up against the tolerances of most home kitchen scales and results get dicey. I've also discovered that OXO scales use some some of smoothing function that allows you to load 20 grams of slowly ground salt at "0" grams if you do it slowly enough. That was a bad batch...

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