good enough for me

[ursamajor]

sandboxdiva pinged me this weekend wanting to ensure that I'd seen the latest Binging with Babish episode since it focused on chocolate chip cookies, so of course I promptly had to sit down and watch it.

1. Did I pause the video to take note of exactly how fancy the ingredients were for the Level 8 cookies, yes I did.

- Valrhona Guanaja 70% Dark Chocolate Feves
- milk chocolate chips from The Meadow
- Mulino Marino Farina Tipo 0
- the best eggs you can find locally
- Nielsen Massey vanilla bean paste
- I couldn't quite make out exactly which Cecilia Rabassi chocolate bars Babish was using, but I'm pretty certain one of them was her milk chocolate Note bar; the other is either the 80% dark chocolate Myway or the 85% dark Cabernet Franc Di Vino.

2. Did I also factcheck Babish on his assertion that "regular old homemade chocolate chip cookies probably cost like $6/batch to make," why yes I did. Come on, buddy, you're based in Brooklyn, groceries aren't cheaper there than in the Bay Area.

Based on the price of white-label ingredients at my local supermarket, plus a bag of Nestle Toll House Chocolate Morsels:

- 62c flour ($5 for a 5 lb bag)
- 2c baking soda ($1.49 for a 1 lb box)
- 1c salt ($1.99 for a 26 oz canister of iodized salt)
- $3 butter ($6 for 4 sticks of butter)
- 45c sugar ($5.49 for a 4 lb bag)
- 80c brown sugar ($4.99 for a 2 lb bag)
- 69c vanilla ($8.29 for a 2 oz bottle)
- 84c eggs ($5/dozen)
- $8.69 chocolate chips (cost of 1 12-ish oz bag of chocolate chips)

So sure, $6.43/batch ... if you don't put any chocolate chips in your chocolate chip cookies, BABISH. And yes, that means that the amortized cost of a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies in 2025 is $15.12. If you had to buy everything from scratch, that's $49.64 before applicable taxes.

3. Am I doing all this to distract myself from all of the elections going down today? Of bloody course I am.

4. Is my version of the Guittard Super Chip cookie recipe still my go-to? Yes, because 72 hours is a long time to wait for cookies. Also, converted to weights, a higher ratio of brown sugar to white sugar, and no nuts.

5. What am I baking for choir tomorrow? Um. I should probably figure that out, shouldn't I. Of all the bougie things to have on hand, I actually currently have a glut of hazelnut flour that needs to get used up, and we do have some gluten-intolerant choir members, so I may end up with a flavor variant of these hazelnut chocolate chip cookies, probably converted to bar format, possibly with the spicing and inclusions changed up.

6. Reminder to self: you'll be in rehearsal tomorrow and will have to miss it, but Community Kitchens is doing trainings for home chef volunteers to cook meals for the Town Fridges in Oakland. Ping them to find out when the next training is.

7. Oh thank god, results are coming in for the major races and I don't know of any truly disasterrific results yet.

Comments

[highlander_ii]

i need to watch Babish's choccie chip cookie vid (it got skipped in favor of hockey game the other night XD). but i'm p sure here would cost more than $6/batch for basic Toll House cookies (i'm in NC). in fact, if you go to walmart and get all great value brand except the chips, it's still $25 for basic ingredients assuming you have none in the pantry. and nearly $5 of that is the chips - so still not hitting less than $6.

this is my current go-to choc chip cookie recipe (i typically use chocolate wafers in dark and semi) - and yours has similar elements. i usually whip up a batch, bake a couple to eat immediately, let the rest of the dough rest in the fridge, then scoop all the dough out into balls that get frozen for later consumption - bc i don't need to eat 4 dozen cookies in less than a week. XD

i also make my own vanilla extract - regular, bourbon, and rum XD

(thanks for letting me babble at you about baking XD)

[ursamajor]

Right? I mean, I could believe basic Toll House cookies costing sub-$10 even in a HCOL area of the US pre-pandemic, but certainly not $6 in the last three to five years! ... but the same local grocery store I referenced above just dropped the price of their Ghirardelli chips to $5, so I think that's my holiday stockup right there.

(I am always happy to babble about baking 😁 )

[highlander_ii]

i'm going to assume that Babish meant $6/batch based on 'someone who has basic pantry ingredients already' thus not counting the cost of any of the things but the chips - in which case, sure, maybe it's right about $6, but even then...

he's not quite to 'how much can a banana cost? like $10?', but getting close XD

[ursamajor]

Yeah, exactly, especially if you look at the two most expensive ingredients per batch, that’s the chocolate chips and then the butter. Eggs, not far behind, brown sugar, surprisingly higher than I expected, but I’ve been keeping an eye on prices for the first three ingredients for a couple of years now, and I wish I’d been more seriously tracking it to understand when exactly my cost of making a batch of chocolate chip cookies doubled.