Raw Cookie Dough

Oh, raw cookie dough. Friend to the impatient and recently-heartbroken, cookie dough traditionally carries a bit of a risk. Cookies generally have raw eggs in them, and improperly handled eggs can carry salmonella. If the dough is made with the expectation of being cooked, or if accidents happen, then the cookie dough can be contaminated. Some people like the element of danger, but most people would prefer to enjoy their snacks without risking disease and illness.

Fortunately, you can make cookie dough without the eggs, thus saving yourself from potential doom. And even though it's not a name-brand, you can totally get the Pillsbury Cookie Dough Theme (note: not an official jingle, but all kinds of awesome) stuck in your head while you're making and eating it.

Now, we've covered raw cookie dough before in the post on Ice Cream, but I had a couple of things I wanted to try, so I figured I'd revisit it.

By and large, making the cookie dough is easy. Melted butter, sugar, brown sugar, salt, flour, vanilla, and milk. Mix the sugars and butter, add in the liquids and salt, and sift in some flour. Very simple. Still, why stop there? We need some more flavor in this, and I decided to go with three modifications to the basic recipe, which I adapted from the Cupcake Friday Project's Cookie Dough Cupcakes.

First, we brown the butter. Because why use normal butter when we can brown the milk solids. I could have gone farther with this and added in some more milk solids, but I decided to go with the base. To brown the butter, start with the basic step of melting the butter.

Then you keep it going, until the milk solids brown.

One of the side effects of this is that you're losing the water from the butter, as the water will boil out before the solids brown. So we get to add a bit more liquid to the recipe.

The second change I made is that I did not want to use normal brown sugar. Instead, I used all regular sugar and added in some sorghum molasses, cause I could. If you don't have fancy molasses, feel free to use regular brown sugar. But I figure, why not go all out?

Finally, instead of using a little bit of regular vanilla extract, I used a lot of my AYFS Spiced Rum Vanilla Extract. After combining as described above, then adding in some chocolate chips, you get cookie dough.

Overall, the changes all contributed to better flavor. I'm not sure it's quite as good as dangerous cookie dough, but it's pretty close. Maybe the element of danger is part of the enjoyment, or maybe eggs are vital to the flavoring. Maybe there's not enough salt. I haven't decided. Next time, I'm going to take half of the butter and, instead of browning the butter, I'm going to make a roux. out of it. This will eliminate much of the raw flour flavor and add some extra depth. Or we could use toasted flour as these Squeeze Cookies from Chocolate & Zucchini do. Toasting the flour limits gluten formation, but we're not really concerned about gluten, so we can probably get by.

Of course, you could just make the Nestle Toll-House Cookie recipe using pasteurized eggs, and you'll have a perfectly lovely and reasonably safe raw cookie dough, but if you are immune compromised or are very young or very old, you might want to play it safe and use a recipe like this. And, if you're not going to cook the dough, I think the changes I've made will improve the raw cookie dough even so.

Raw Cookie Dough

Ingredients

1/2 cup unsalted butter, browned

1/4 tsp. salt

3/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup molasses

3 Tbl. milk

1 Tbl. vanilla extract

1 cup flour

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions

Combine the butter, sugar, and molasses, and stir to combine.

Add in the liquids and salt, and stir to combine.

Slowly add in the flour, stirring.

Stir in the chocolate chips.