Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever (Grad Student Variation)

Simply put, these are the best chocolate chip cookies ever. Perhaps the best cookies ever. You will never bite into a chewier, more flavorful chocolate chip cookie than this one. However, I must warn that it's not for the faint of heart or the counter of calories. You must approach this cookie without regard for health and without fear of indulgence. It is nothing if not decadent.

The recipe is the result of a New York Times search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. It's genius lies in two departures from the usual cookie recipe. First, it uses my favorite trick in baking, letting time do the work for you. Optimally, you prepare the dough 36 hrs before you plan to bake the cookies, letting it sit in the fridge in the intervening time. The waiting period gives the flour a chance to fully absorb the liquid, primarily the egg. Second, it tops the cookies with sea salt just before baking. The salt plays off the sweetness of the dough and the slight bitterness of the chocolate to make it a truly unforgettable cookie.

I've slightly adapted it for the grad student budget. If you make this cookie you must not dispense with a) the fridge time, b) the salt, or c) the golf ball sized scoops of dough. c) is important because it allows different regions to develop in the cookie as it spreads out in the oven heat. You get a crispy outer edge which morphs into a chewy, gooey center. Also, cook them until they are just golden brown and follow the directions of first putting the sheet on a rack for 10 minutes before transferring the cookies to the rack. In doing so you are letting the cooking process, which continues once they have left the oven, complete itself undisturbed.

NY Times Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted for the Graduate student budget

(The original recipe is here, if you want to get fancy.)

3 1/3 cups of all purpose flour (17 oz)
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract

1.25 lbs of chocolate chunks (about 1.5 bags of the nestle semisweet chocolate chunks)

Sea salt*

1. Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.

2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.

4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.

You can also freeze the dough balls. Allow them to defrost in the fridge for 24 hrs before you bake them. I tried baking them directly but since they were so big they defrosted unevenly.

Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.


*I use fleur de sel (salt flower), an airy and flavorful salt which dissolves on your tongue. Trader Joe's has a good one for a good price.

Roasted Peaches

On my way home from work yesterday, as I was thinking of what I needed to pick up from the grocery store, I had a flash of inspiration. Kyle had requested I get something for dessert and I realized I could put a twist on our standby dessert of fresh fruit and vanilla bean ice cream. The result? Warm, sweet peaches, soft enough to melt away from our knives like butter, splashed with tangy balsamic vinegar syrup and accompanied by some plain and simple vanilla bean ice cream. Yum. And it only takes about 20 min!

Roasted Peaches with Balsamic Syrup

Syrup:
3/4 cups of balsamic vinegar
1 - 2 rounded teaspoons of brown sugar

2 peaches, halved and pitted
1 tbsp unsalted butter

Preheat the oven to 400F.

In skillet (oven proof if you have one) melt the butter over medium heat. Add the peaches, cut side down, cover and cook for about 8 minutes, checking them often to make sure they aren't sticking to the skillet.

Meanwhile put the balsamic vinegar in a small sauce pan over medium low heat and add the brown sugar. Let this cook down, stirring occasionally, until the liquid turns syrupy and clings to a spoon. It should take 10-15 min.

Move the peaches, cut side down, to a baking sheet or just leave them in the skillet if it is oven proof, and put them into the oven. Cook for 8 minutes then remove the sheet/skillet and flip them cut side up. Return them to the oven and turn on the broiler for 3 minutes. *these times are rather approximate and will vary depending on the size of the peach. just watch to make sure they don't burn!

Serve drizzled with the balsamic syrup and accompanied by a big scoop of vanilla bean ice cream.

The Universality of the Biological Clock

image from Softpedia

Biological clocks are often blamed for the dearth of women in the faculty ranks of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines. The argument is that women want to have babies and view the academic life as incompatible with motherhood so the drive to reproduce forces them out of the field. Certainly there is some truth to this argument. Academia does not look kindly on those who do not spend every waking minute of their pre-tenure career working and I'm told that bearing and raising children takes a non negligible amount of time. However, a new study presented at a recent American Chemical Society meeting and reported on by Inside Higher Ed, shows that some graduate programs in chemistry place many more women in faculty positions than others, casting doubt on the dominance of the biological clock effect.

The study looked at the faculties of the top 94 chemistry departments and found that about 50% of the faculty members hired between 1994 and 2003 came from 12 graduate programs. They then looked at the number of men and women each of those 12 programs supplied to those top 94 chemistry departments. The variation across campuses was astonishing. Berkeley educated 31 male and 21 female chem professors whereas 32 male but only 2 women graduated from Harvard. MIT fared similarly poorly, supplying 30 male and only 6 female faculty members. The effect was diluted when they looked at the institution where these faculty members did their post doctoral work, but in general women from West Coast post docs fared better than their East Coast counter parts.

So, what happens to the biological clock explanation when confronted with these numbers? As the study author, Valerie J. Kuck, points out, "the women at Berkeley have the same biological clocks as other women, but they are getting jobs." So if we postulate that the biological clock is universal, that there isn't something in Berkeley's water which inoculates it's women against the pull of motherhood, then we must acknowledge that there is some other effect that is contributing to the loss of women in the academic pipeline.

This loss, while small for physics, is a big problem for chemistry and it is termed the "leaky pipeline". At each step of the academic ladder, women leak out. As I talked about before, women obtain over 30% of the PhDs in chemistry but only about 15% of the faculty hiring pool. (In physics the faculty applicant pool is only a couple of percentage points lower than the PhD pool for women). This data seems to suggest that for some institutions the discrepancy might be even greater while others have learned to plug the leaks.

The study prompts a multitude of questions which more or less fall in the vein of "How does Berkeley do it? and why is Harvard failing its women?". That characterization of the questions might have some institutional bias (Go Bears!) in it but I think it's basically correct. Unfortunately neither the study nor the article have anwsers. I know that Berkeley's school of Chemistry founded the national chemistry women's honor society, Iota Sigma Pi, in 1907 and that it is quite active, hosting social events and career development workshops. Their 2008-2009 events include panels on choosing a research group, writing a resume and navigating academic and industry career paths. I was also interested in this workshop, which directly deals with a problem many intelligent women seem to face: Overcoming the Impostor Syndrome: How to Feel as Bright and Capable as Everyone Seems to Think You Are. (It's a whole 'nother can of blog posts.) I don't know if Harvard or MIT have similar organizations, but in comparison to the other women in science organizations I know about, the Berkeley ISP stands out as a well rounded, complete and effective organization. I suspect they have something to do with Berkeley's success in creating female academics.

I'd love to see a similar study for physics, but the numbers might be too small. In any case, this study, which I hope grows to a full publication, reminds us that we shouldn't become complacent and use biology as an excuse for the gender imbalance in the sciences.

Quick Links: Biology and a Day in the Life

On my flight back from New Hampshire I found that Virgin provided a few TED lectures as part of their in flight entertainment. TED, a non profit who's tagline is "Ideas Worth Spreading", hosts and records lectures by leading thinkers in art, science, technology and pretty much anything else. Not only are these thinkers experts in their metier, but they are also good speakers, which means that these lectures, far from being boring, can connect with any audience. On the flight I watched a lecture by Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton professor who has done some important work in bacteria function. In this lecture she describes how bacteria talk to each other and how understanding this communication allows us to develop a new types of antibiotic and gives us insight into the development of multi cellular organisms. It was absolutely fascinating!





I also wanted to share an article in this month's Symmetry magazine, an excellent publication on particle physics geared towards physicists and the public alike. This article chronicles an (atypical) day in the life of Hitoshi Murayama, a distinguished Berkeley physics professor, director of the Japanese Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, member of my qual committee and all around good guy. The article, written by him, describes the day he met the Imperial family of Japan.

Warmed Garbanzos over Bitter Salad Greens

Yesterday I came home from Monterey Market with more tomatoes anyone in their right mind would buy for two people. I couldn't help myself. As soon as I stepped under the market's canopy the dry farmed Early Girls, whom I haven't seen in almost a year, called to me and I was powerless to stop myself from shoveling them into my cart.* A bag full of basil and a loaf of good bread had also found their way home with me so I decided to make bruschetta, arguably the best way to serve fresh, wonderful tomatoes. However, bruschetta does not a meal make so I needed to find something most substantive to accompany it. Also, I wasn't in the mood to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, so it had to be quick. Motivated by thoughts of herbed italian canellini beans and the memory of this wonderful dish (I made it a couple of years ago and often think about it fondly), I came up with garbanzo beans cooked in olive oil with some simple adornments of garlic, parsley and parmesean. To complement the warm creaminess of the beans I served it over some bitter salad greens, also a Monterey market buy, dressed in olive oil and vinegar. The result was unexpectedly satisfying!

Sadly there are no photos associated with this recipe due to an unfortunate accident involving a car door and Kyle's camera's LCD screen. Hopefully we'll get it fixed soon!


Warmed Garbanzos over Bitter Salad Greens

1 can of garbanzo beans
1/4-1/3 cup olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced with a pinch or two of salt
1/4 cup of loosely packed chopped parsley
1/4 cup grated parmesean or other hard salty cheese
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Bitter salad greens in a simple vinaigrette. I used red indian mustard greens dressed with olive oil and sherry vinegar.

Warm the garlic in the olive oil in a very small pot over medium-low heat. Add the garbanzos and continue to cook until the oil starts to bubble. There should be enough oil to cover about half to two thirds of the garbanzos, add more if necessary. Add the parsley, stir and continue to cook for 1 min. Remove from heat and stir in the cheese, salt and pepper. Allow to cool for 5 min then serve over the dressed greens.

* According to wikipedia these tomatoes have a cult following. I'm glad to hear I'm not alone in my obsession! Here is a video about dry farming from one of the local Early Girl producers. He looks like a hipster, talks like a surfer and knows farming like, well, a farmer:

More on Dry Farming from Dirty Girl from Oliveto Community on Vimeo.

LHC News

The LHC has been in the news a lot recently, here here* and here**, and the press has been less than positive. Not inaccurate per se, but twisted and seen in the most negative light possible. In this post I'll try to lay the current status and future plans out for you, explain what they mean, and give my perspective on them. You should know that I'm certainly not an optimist when it comes to the LHC. As they say, once bitten, twice shy.


The facts are these: September 19th, 2008 the LHC experienced a major accident while trying to commission the magnets to reach their design current capacity. While ramping up the current in a set of superconducting magnets a defect in the connections between magnets caused a part of the assembly go resistive, resulting in an electrical arc which punctured the cryostat walls, bringing the superfluid helium into contact with room temperature air and, most generally, releasing a lot of energy in a short period of time (i.e. explosion, although no combustion occurred). That was a mouthful. In simple terms, the magnets had an enormous amount of energy flowing through them unhindered and then all of a sudden the energy encountered a blockage and dumped itself into the surrounding material. This great release of energy melted the interface between the magnets, their cooling systems, and the tunnel which meant that their cooling medium, superfuild helium (1.7K, colder than outer space!), hit the warm air of the tunnel. The helium went from a superfluid state to gas, resulting in a 400x increase in volume and pressure waves which rocked the 1o ton magnets out of their anchors, moving some by almost half a meter and blowing the doors of the tunnel off their hinges. Pretty spectacular, but also pretty devastating to a machine which had been decades in the making.

It wasn't until about six months after the accident that the LHC team truly understood the cause of the problem, a faulty design for the interconnects between the magnets, called bus bar splices. They used a design that was less expensive than the standard one used in other superconducting machines but which ultimately could not withstand the currents required by the LHC. There are thousands of these splices which will need to be replaced before the LHC can go to its design energy, 7 TeV.

These faulty splices do not prevent the LHC from running at a lower energy, however. Each splice has been measured to find out how much current it can withstand and the LHC believes it can safely run at up to 5 TeV. The current run plan, announced last week, is to start at 3.5 TeV beams, take a sizable amount of data at that energy then slowly ramp up to 5 TeV by the end of 2010. This procedure will nominally begin in late November, from that one can project first collisions by late December/early January at injection energy (450 GeV) and then 3.5 TeV collisions a month or so later. Now, I don't believe that schedule. I fully expect it to slip by a couple of months because things never run as smoothly as expected. However, I do think we will get an analyzable amount of data in the first half of 2010.



So, what does that all mean? What is a TeV and why does it matter if the machine runs at 3.5,5, or 7? A TeV stands for a trillion electron volts, or a trillion times the energy an electron accumulates while traveling through a one volt potential. It's an arcane unit, but us physicists are fond of them, so they pop up all over the place. The important thing to remember is that it is a unit of energy. The important parameters of the LHC are what energy it will collide protons at and how many collisions it will produce (termed its luminosity).

Now on to the why does it matter part, and it all comes down to

E = mc^2

Einstein's famous equation, embedded in the public consciousness yet not always understood, means that energy can be converted to mass and vice versa. For particle physicists this equation means that we can collide particles (protons) to create new particles and the energy of those collisions determines how massive a particle we can create. As we increase the energy of the collisions we can produce more massive particles and probe the laws of physics at a deeper level.

The other important parameter is the number of collisions because the outcome of any single collision is a priori unknown. There is a probability of producing particle X, Y or Z in a collision but we don't know that collision 1 will produce X, collision 2 will produce Y and so on. We just know that there is a (very small) probability that X will be produced so we have to collide enough protons to know that 10 or 100 or 1000 Xs should've been produced. We then look for X in our data and we can verify whether or not the probability we expected was correct.

Collision II by Dawn Mason

These probabilities change with energy: it's easier to produce heavy particles when there is more energy in a collision. So the LHC is trying to maximize the energy and number of collisions as soon as possible. 3.5 TeV will be a good start. It's already over 3 times the current highest energy particle accelerator at Fermi Lab.

The 2010 data will not be a big leap forward for particle physics. More likely it will be like the little hop and step the long jumper takes before hurtling herself through the air. (edit: long jumpers don't actually take that hop and skip. I was thinking of a cross between a long jump and a triple jump) Unless we are extremely lucky and Nature has been extremely gracious, the real discoveries won't come until 2011 or 2012. But 2010 will be good enough for me to graduate. And that's about all I care about right now.


*This article, the most positive of the three is nearly impossible to find on the NYTimes website, whereas the others are quite easy to find.
**This article is the worst thing I've read in a long time. Absolutely terrible and I can't believe the NYTimes published it as 'journalism'.

A couple of quick links

For the next week I'll be in New Hampshire with Kyle, visiting his family and going to (yet another) wedding. We flew over on Virgin America, a slick new airline offering low prices for cross country travel. As we were waiting on the jetway, we noticed an eerie purple glow emanating from the open plane doors. As we got closer we realized that the purple lights were in fact the cabin lighting. It was as if a Euro disco designer had broken into Virgin headquarters and replaced all the standard cabin designs with the plans for her new ultra chic cocktail lounge. In the ensuing chaos the executives reverted the design back to its original form, except a few details such as the lighting and the clear purple plastic dividers separating the main cabin from rest of the plane, slipped through the cracks.

The novelty of the purple lighting was quickly replaced by wonder at the entertainment center located at the back of every seat. It had a fancy touch screen interface which allowed you to play movies, tv, music, games, chat with other passengers and order food or drinks. The armrest yielded a controller complete with a full keyboard and game control buttons. I watched a bit of TV, since it was free while the movies were not, and came across Boing Boing television. Boing Boing, a website whose tag line is "a directory of wonderful things", is a procrastination mecca focused on tech and science related internet content. Apparently they also make videos. They had an awesome report on the preparations astronauts took before the Hubble servicing mission, which I mentioned earlier. Check it out, it's pretty cool:


Also, there is a new rap coming out about particle physics (about Fermilab, not the LHC), this time from a certified hip hop artist. I can't wait for the video, but here is a quote from the piece:

“…rock stars of physics, particle business
smash matter, antimatter and witness
quarks, bottom to top they don’t stop
‘where the Higgs at?’ yo that’s their mark
‘where the Higgs at?’ ”

- Funky49, “Particle Business”

More Summery Fun

The wonderful thing about summer cooking is that it is so simple. The produce is so fresh it requires little preparation and the long sunny days demand light and delicate meals. All I did for the above pasta dish was to thinly slice some squash lengthwise with my mandoline and then saute it with a bit of olive oil and garlic until it was just tender. I transferred the squash to a bowl and sauteed three thinly sliced gypsy peppers in the same skillet with a bit of additional oil. Then I tossed cooked penne with ribboned basil, a couple of diced fresh tomatoes, the sauteed vegetables and some crumbled feta. Yum. And so visually pleasing too!

This Post has Nothing to Do with Food or Physics

photo from WikiCommons

One of my regular sources of music, aside from my sister and dad, is NPR music. There is a strong 30-something-year-old-white-guys-with-beards-and-shaggy-hair-singing-really-deep-songs indie streak to what they play*, but they also manage to showcase a wide variety of music, from afro-pop to opera. Some of their best content comes from the concerts they stream from festivals such as South By South West and small venues covered by their member stations. Recently, they broadcast the entire Newport Folk Festival and archived the performances on their website. I would like to recommend listening to Mavis Staples, civil rights gospel diva. This woman, with her timeless, incredible voice and her sparkling personality, performed regularly for Martin Luther King, was proposed to by Bob Dylan, and sang one of the theme songs to the Obama campaign. She was a guest on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and had everyone laughing at her jokes and amazed at her life story. It's also a recommended listen!

*Full Disclosure: I like some of those bands, but only in moderation, with the exception of the Decemberists. Hazards of Love, which NPR broadcast in its entirety from SXSW, routinely goes on repeat in my iTunes player.

LHC in the News

Denis Overbye, a NYTimes science writer who I'm not particularly fond of because of his bent towards the sensationalistic and grandiose, had a front page story today on the problems that are plaguing the LHC. None of the information is new, but it gives an accurate, if somewhat unflattering, update on the problems and repairs. The article is relatively good, i.e factual, except for a number of irritating quotes by hotshot theorists such as this gem from Nima Arkani Hamed:

“I want it to get up running. We can’t tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now.”

Well Professor Arkani-Hamed, would you like to take up a welding torch or get your hands messy with some magnet calculations? And why were you talking to him in the first place, Mr. Overbye?


Later this week CERN management will make a decision as to how much energy we will run at and for how long (something I will explain in a later post) so that will be some real news.

If my day had a theme song

This would be it.

Julie, Julia, Jaques and Pollan

Michael Pollan, our national food conscience, has an article in the New York Times Magazine today examining America's relationship with food through its obsession with prime time cooking competitions. It's worth a read, despite it's length, because it completes the argument that Omnivore's Dilemma starts; that America has lost it's victual soul to the mass production of food and that we can only regain it if we, as a nation, begin to cook again. He makes this argument by looking at the evolution of the cooking show from The French Chef, Julia Child's PBS cooking class to Iron Chef, the Food Network's turbo charged cooking competition. It's no surprise that the article starts with Julia Child, because she has been brought back into the popular consciousness by the movie Julie and Julia, which opens this week with Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie, a woman who decided to blog about a year spent cooking all of the recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. ( I cannot wait to see it! )

In general Pollan makes his argument well, as he usually does, but he also makes some half hearted statements about gender politics as they relate to home cooking (i.e. women no longer in the home) which he doesn't develop. They are too simplistic, seemingly cowardly throw-ins which he injects but won't defend. I'm sure the feminist blogosphere will have a field day with them. Of course Michael Pollan does not want to see women back in the kitchen, but he never argues for who should be doing the home cooking, once the domain of the housewife, which he needs to do if he is going to make statements such as "[the fulfillment of cooking was] a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen." Come on Michael, you are a better journalist than that.

Feminist digressions aside, I brought up the Pollan article to share my own experiences with cooking shows, since they were a staple of my childhood, or at least they play a prominent part in my memories. I used to sit with my dad on the weekend afternoons and watch the Frugal Gourmet, Yan Can Cook, and Jaques Pépin on PBS, entranced by the whirling knives and steaming concoctions. I was a kid who didn't like food, yet these shows still gripped me because the chefs were charismatic, each in his own way, and every episode was about creation. They were roadmaps for turning the simple into delicious, and it didn't matter that I wouldn't eat what they had prepared even if the alternative was to sit at the kitchen table for the rest of my life, it was the process that was fascinating. A couple of weeks ago I had 20 minutes to kill before heading out to a wedding for a classmate so I turned on the TV and saw Jaques Pépin, still at it. I had not seen the show in ten years or so. His hair is greyer and his movements are perhaps a bit slower, but he still captured my attention and taught me a couple useful techniques. The Food Network shows have never appealed to me. They seem to be about spectacle and flair, whereas the shows of my childhood were about the food, the process, and a wise and engaging teacher to show you the way.



I think I also loved watching him because of the accent!
Update: Jasmin also has a take on this subject

Summer Splendor

Tomato season is truly upon us! This week our CSA box contained three types of delicious tomatoes. What you see above are sliced heirlooms with some basil, lemon and garlic mixed olive oil. I minced a small clove of garlic, combined it in a bowl with the chopped zest of one lemon and about 10 slivered leaves of basil and covered them with olive oil. After mixing and letting it sit for a few minutes I brushed the toast with the oil then layered it with the tomatoes and finished it off with the basil/lemon/garlic mixture and some parmesean. Tasted just like summer!