Chocolate chip cookie

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Image:Chocolate chip cookies.jpg A chocolate chip cookie is a type of cookie originating in the United States. As its name implies, it is characterized by the inclusion of chocolate chips, but beyond that defining characteristic, there is a great deal of variation within this kind of cookie.

1 History
2 Composition and variants
3 In popular culture
4 Popular Brands
5 Citations
6 References
7 External links

[edit] History

The chocolate chip cookie, also known as the Toll House Cookie, was accidentally developed by Ruth Graves Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn near Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1933. Wakefield was making chocolate cookies but ran out of regular baker's chocolate and substituted pieces of semi-sweet chocolate broken apart using a knife, assuming it would melt and mix into the batter. It did not, and the cookie with chips of chocolate was born. (The restaurant, housed in a former toll house built in 1709, burned down in 1984.) Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips in North America has Wakefield's original recipe printed on the back.

Today, half the cookies baked in American homes are chocolate-chip, with an estimated seven billion consumed annually.

[edit] Composition and variants

Chocolate chip cookies are made with white sugar, brown sugar, flour, eggs, and semi-sweet chocolate. Sometimes nuts (such as chopped walnuts) are added to the batter. While the Toll House recipe is considered the standard, the ingredients can be adjusted to give the cookies slightly different properties.<ref>Jonathan Levitt, "They're Not As Easy To Make As To Eat," Boston Globe, 7 June 2006, C2. Available through ProQuest eLibrary.</ref> Regardless of ingredients, the procedure is more or less the same in all recipes. First, sugar and butter are creamed at high speed, usually with a whisk or a standing mixer. The brown sugar is added, followed by the eggs and then the flour and leavener, usually baking powder. The titular ingredient, chocolate chips, are typically mixed in towards the end of the process, just before the cookies are scooped and positioned on a cookie sheet. Most cookie dough is baked, although some eat the dough as is, or use it as an addition to vanilla ice cream to make "cookie dough ice cream".

One common variant is the chocolate chocolate chip cookie, where the cookie surrounding the chips is also chocolate flavoured, through the addition of cocoa or melted chocolate.

[edit] In popular culture

In addition to being American pop culture icons in and of themselves, chocolate chip cookies are often referenced in the media:

Chocolate chip cookies are the favored cookies of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster.
Doubletree Hotels, Suites, Resorts and Clubs present a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie to each guest at check-in. The hotel chain has done so since the 1980s as a way of distinguishing itself from its competitors.
Midwest Airlines bakes and serves fresh chocolate chip cookies on board many of its flights.
The desert camouflage pattern worn by US forces during the first Gulf War earned the nickname 'chocolate chip' due to how it resembled chocolate chip cookie dough, with its brown, black and light tan specks scattered across the garment.
In the movie Aviator, Howard Hughes asks his friend, Odie, for a bag of chocolate chip cookies, in the screening room. He then tells Odie to tilt the bag at a Forty-Five degree angle, so he would not touch the outside of the bag.
Citibank offers free Mrs. Fields cookies to customers.