Research paper: “Toll House” Recipe Cookies Do Not Maintain Their Morphology Under Heat Stress Conditions

We investigated the morphological behavior of chocolate chip cookies.

Results

We confirm the qualitative analysis that dough both spreads and loses integrity of hard corners due to heat shock (see Figures 1a and 1b).

The dough is a suspension of starch, sucrose and lipid-based chips in butterfat, which is subjected to pretreatment and post-treatment by heat. Application of heat appears to alter morphology of the suspension, resulting in more spread and smoother-edged objects.

In addition, quantification of changes in absolute area and circularity confirm that dough loses its morphometric integrity when heated to 375 degrees F. Absolute area change is an index of spreading. All specimens spread typically by more than 100 percent each. Circularity is an index of variation from a perfect circle where 1 = perfect circle and, for our uses as it is known that area increases over time, 0 = perimeter approaching infinity. Circularity increases by approximately 25 percent which indicates the smoothing and loss of detailed edge features. Unfortunately, we were unable to establish a 1:1 correlation between area change and increase of circularity in individual specimens; however, the population study of each parameter isolated from the other is compelling