Worst. Cookies. Ever.

Last week, Mark Bittman posted a new recipe for The Mother Of All Butter Cookies. His point was that this recipe was akin to a mother sauce and an easy and flexible base that could be turned into butterscotch cookies, chocolate chip cookies, citrus cookies... Sounds great, huh?

Some of you might ask: the Tollhouse Cookies are an all-time classic for a reason, how can you possible improve on them? Good question. I'd like the cookies to be a little more fluffy, but I'm not sure how to do this without using shortening, which I don't like.

There were a few things in the recipe that are certainly unusual, but conventional wisdom in cooking is not always right. First of all, the dough is mixed in a food processor. But this works well for pie dough. Second, it has a lot of cornstarch. Cornstarch? The reason Bittman gives is "to avoid overdeveloping gluten" and to add a "silken quality" to the cookies. Finally, it has unsalted butter, but only calls for a "pinch" of salt. Is that enough? On the other hand, it has a larger butter-to-flour ratio than the tollhouse cookies, and butter is good.

Well, the food processor appeared to work reasonably well; it was definitely cookie dough that came out (though my kitchenaid was standing there watching forlornly). But the cookies? The recipe suggests baking for 11 minutes at 375 F (and our oven is reasonably well calibrated). After 10 minutes, the bottoms were brown and the tops were uncooked. The chocolate chips weren't even melting. After a total of 15 or 16 minutes we just took them out. They were completely uncooked in the middle; the chocolate chips were barely warm; they had the texture and flavor of raw cornstarch; there was no flavor (possibly related to the lack of salt).

I wouldn't serve these cookies to my worst enemies. I put a comment on the Bitten blog, and it's still awaiting moderation. My guess is that the moderator is overwhelmed with people complaining that these are the

Worst. Cookies. Ever.

UPDATE: My comment has finally made it through moderation, along with a few more comments agreeing that these cookies suck.

Tandoori or don't we?

Tonight Becky and I made Mark Bittman's Twice Cooked Mock Tandoori Chicken. We've previously tried Madhur Jaffrey's Tandoori Chicken from An Invitation to Indian Cooking (a classic from 1973 with the world's longest subtitle).

What's new and interesting about Bittman's version is the cooking method: baking the chicken in the sauce first, and then grilling it to finish. We think this worked well, but (a) the baking time was waaaay too long (b) there was about 3x too large yogurt to spice ratio and (c) it didn't actually taste like tandoori chicken (it must be noted that we never got the Jaffrey recipe to taste like tandoori chicken either!). One of the problems was that the chicken was still too wet when we put it on the grill. When Bittman says to scrape away the excess sauce before grilling, he means it!

We had it with fresh-baked naan which came out very tasty, which we finished on the grill.