Papa Murphy’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

One of the fun aspects about the Hillsboro July 4th parade, is that most of the parade entries toss candy or other goodies to the crowd.  Small children usually sit in the front row so they can get easily get the hard candies tossed out to the crowd.  I was with some of the other men in our group standing about ten feet back from the curb.  We would occasionally get a few candies tossed our way (Mmm, root beer barrels) or other interesting items.  One member of our group caught a small bag of baby carrots thrown from a vehicle representing our local hospital; we must be getting old as we enjoyed the carrots more than the candy.

A small van representing Reser’s Fine Foods passed, but they missed tossing their sample pepperoni sticks to our group.  Though a little while later, I managed to get one of the best items handed out at the parade.  It was a coupon for Papa Murphy’s on either $3 off any size take ‘n’ bake pizza, or a free container of their take ‘n’ bake chocolate chip cookie dough.  I thought it would make a great product to test and see how their cookies compare to the Alton Brown chocolate chip cookie recipe.

My wife and I went by and picked up the container of cookie dough from our local Papa Murphy’s store.  It is a pint container with 16 ounces of cookie dough.  The first thing I did was to turn on the oven to 375 degrees, get out two cookie sheets and started scooping out roughly 1/2 tablespoon sized portions.  The next thing was to read the list of ingredients on the package: for such a simple product (a cookie), there are a lot of added items (salt, mono and diglycerides, calcium disodium EDTA, colored with Annatto, artificial flavor, etc).

I baked the cookies for ten minutes and when I removed the first pan, I noticed that the cookies smelled as if they were burning.  I quickly moved them from the cookie sheet to a cooling rack and checked the bottoms to see how badly they burned.  I was surprised that the cookies had just the normal brown color and there was no evidence of burning.  I baked the second sheet for nine minute, and they also had a burning smell when I removed them from the oven, but again, no burning on the cookies.  I am not sure what caused the burning smell, but the cookies did not taste burned.

I let the cookies cool and then tried one.  The first thing I noticed is the cookies are very thin and crisp (I like a soft cookie and will usually under bake the cookies so they remain soft).  The base dough doesn’t have a lot of flavor, without the chocolate chips, I might have thought it was a sugar cookie or snicker doodle.  The chocolate chips are real Hershey’s semi-sweet, and they provide all the flavor to the cookie.

My wife and I agreed that they are an average cookie, but personally I would take the extra time and make the cookies from scratch and end up with a great chocolate chip cookie rather than settle for one that is average.

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell