Analyzing Catherine Zhang's Matcha White Chocolate Cookie Recipe
Today we will take a closer look at one of our favourite social media food personalities - Catherine Zhang!
She has been quite busy lately coming up with so much food content that we cannot help but notice all the delicious food she has been sharing with us.
In this post, I would like to dive deeper into her Matcha White Chocolate Cookie Recipe and analyse what she did to make her recipe stand out.
We will be comparing her recipe with other similar recipes as well in a later post.
Please don't take this post as a criticism of Catherine's recipe. These are just my opinions which I'm sharing with you.
Ingredients Unwrapped
Here's a list of ingredients based on Catherine's post here
- 110g of Unsalted butter
- 70g of Brown sugar
- 100g of Granulated sugar
- 200g of All-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp of Baking powder
- 1/2 tsp of Baking soda
- 2 tsp of Matcha powder
- 1 Large egg
- 1 Egg yolk
- 200g of White chocolate
- A dash of Flakey salt
Note: Prep time is 20 minutes, and the cooking time is 15 minutes. This does not include the chilling time of 30 minutes in the freezer of 1 hour in the fridge!
Analyzing Catherine Zhang's Method
Preheat the oven at 180C/355F and line a baking tray with parchment paper
I'm not sure why most bakers start with pre-heating the oven as the first step, even if the following steps are still quite involve and would take more than 15 minutes to do. I think it's a waste of energy, but that might just be me!
I mean, we are still going to chill the cookie dough for 30 minutes in the freezer or up to 1 hour in the fridge. Surely the oven can be pre-heated later?
Brown the butter
Browning the butter adds more a more nutty and toffee flavour to the cookie. I like this extra step, and it's so easy to do with any recipe that containes butter!
Whisk all the dry ingredients together
This is fairly standard, but it's better to sift them as well to avoid lumps.
Mix the sugars with the cooled butter and the eggs
This step is usually called the creaming method. Normally, this is done by mixing the soft butter with the sugar first until light and fluffy, then we add the eggs one at a time.
Catherine's step simply told us to mix the cooled butter and eggs.
Since the preivous steps involves borwning the butter, we'll probably be working with liquid butter here.
I'm not sure this will make a big difference in the final result, but this might be an interesting experiement to do!
Stir the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients, then fold the chopped white chocolate
Fairly standard step here, I have no comment, except that one should be careful not to over-mix the dough to prevent too much air bubbles as well as preventing gluten development resulting in dense cookies (this might be another good experiment).
Divide the dough into 9 portions then place into a lined baking sheet then chill for up to 1 hour.
Unless you have a big (or empty) fridge, you may want to store the cookies in a smaller container rather than putting the whole baking sheet in your fridge!
Chilling the dough is quite important to ensure you have thick and chewy cookies. This is a fairly standard step.
Depedning on the temperature of the room your'e working on as well as the consistency of the resulting dough, it might be a good idea to chill the dough first before shaping them into balls. I'm thinking at this stage, the dough might be too sticky since we used liquid browned butter.
Bake at 180C/355F for 15 minutes, then cool in a cooling rack
If this is the first time you're doing this, it's a good idea to try one cookie to see how it will turn out.
You may want to adjust the time or even the temperature depending on the consistency you're aiming for.
To come up with a chewy cookie, you don't want to over bake the cookies, or else, they will become crunchy. These cookies will also become brown instead of green if you over bake them.
You also don't want to under bake or else you will end up with unbaked cooke dough in the center.
So try to experiment with the temperature and the cooking time to come up with the perfect color and consitency for your cookies.
What Else Did Cahterine Say in Her Blog Post?
Apparently, there's a difference between ceremonial match and culinary matcha.
For some of us, we'll just be lucky to be able to have access to matcha in the first place! But this is good to know.
Catherine suggests to use high-quality culinary grade matcha for her bakes to achieve a bright green color and strong matcha flavour.
She also said that low quality matcha tends to brown when cooked and also have less distinct flavour.
For those of us without access to high-quality culinary grade matcha, I have the following suggestions:
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If your cookie become too brown, either reduce the cooking time or the temperature. You'll want sufficient baking time to come up with cooked cookie centers but not too much that your cookies start to brown too much. You can even add food coloring to your cookies if you really want to make them look green anyway!
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If you want more matcha flavour, add more matcha powder to the batter! Start with 1 tsp at a time and adjust to your liking.
Catherine's Advice to Make the Perfect Matcha Cookie
- I lover her first advise - taste the dough! This step is quite easy to miss for some but actualy very crucial.
- Chill the dough - we've discussed this previously.
- Press the cookie balls down before baking - apparently this creates picture-perfect cookies. Some bakers skip this step. I'm thinking this helps to help not to under-bake the cookie centers, since we're too concerned about not browning these cookies too much.
Catherine's Ingredients discussed
- She just mentioned to use unsalted butter, but did not discuss why she preferred to use browned butter rather than regular butter.
- Brown sugar - apparently this provides chewiness and additional caramel flavour. I agree to these!
- Granulated sugar - I wonder what's the reason to mix brown and white sugar? Why not just all brown sugar? Is there such a thing as cookies that are too chewy? I might give this a try!
- Baking powder - apparently this prevents cookies from becoming rock hard. I guess we should also watch the baking time?
- Baking soda - some recipes don't use baking soda. I wonder how much this influences the final result. We'll have to find out!
- Egg yolk - she mentions this adds fat and flavour to the cookie, making them more rich and chewy. I would prefer a recipe that did not end up with egg whites I have to think of what to do with them.
- Vanilla extract - optional, but if you use good vanilla, you will taste the difference!
- Flakey salt - I agree with her on this one. Adding a small amount of flakey salt is a game changer indeed. Note that flakey salt is less salty than table salt, so if you only have table salt you want to add a really tiny bit.
Final Words
Overall, I think Catherine Zhang's Matcha White Chocolate Cookies are a winner. Her use of brown butter with brown sugar is a perfect way to add more flavour intensity as well as chewiness to the cookie. Her tips for chiling the dough is spot on as well as her tips for choosing which matcha powder to use.
Now, let's get baking and test them out!
You can read the rest of Catherine's blog post here