Secrets to Cookies

I love butter cookies but whenever I try making a batch, something generally goes wrong. Usually I've somehow put in too much flour or too much butter or too much something so that the poor cookies come out dry and tasteless. And the kitchen is usually a mess, too, with flour just about everywhere. And flour is pretty darn hard to clean up. All that work and sweat for hockey-puck cookies. :(

Of course, I always blame it on the recipe, which doesn't make much sense because I can use the same recipe twelve times and end up with twelve entirely different textured cookies. So I was really happy to find "Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies That Sing", a NYT article by Julia Moskin. According to the article

“Butter has that razor melting point,” said Shirley O. Corriher, a food scientist and author of the recently published “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking” (Scribner).

For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.

Not only that, but you can't rechill the butter. At least not for baking purposes:

“Once butter is melted, it’s gone,” said Jennifer McLagan, author of the new book “Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes” (Ten Speed Press).

Warm butter can be rechilled and refrozen, but once the butterfat gets warm, the emulsion breaks, never to return.

I think this is an article Julia Child would have been very happy with and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know why their butter cookies stink. As for me, having read the article, I am so exhausted, I think I'll just go to my local Italian deli the next time I want a nice butter cookie. They've got those great ones that are half dipped in chocolate.