Did you know how many chocolate chips the Bishop Gadsden bakery uses in creating its scrumptious chocolate chip cookies? It uses 16 pounds or 256 ounces of the tiny bits of chocolate goodness to make a recipe of 402 cookies that will last for only two weeks! Altogether, the bakery produces 1,000 cookies each week in different flavors.
“Chocolate chips are 100 percent the most popular cookie at the bakery,” said Sheena Kruger, the pastry sous chef. “We sell twice as many as any other flavor.” The other standard cookies are white chocolate macadamia, and oatmeal raisin. Then they rotate peanut butter, double chocolate, sugar, and shortbread. She thinks chocolate chips are so popular because they are comfort food and remind us of cooking with Grandma. Fresh out of the oven, they are truly hard to resist.
Sheena explained that the quality of the ingredients makes or break the success of a cookie. For the chocolate chip variety, the bakery uses two different kinds of chocolate chips - semisweet mini chocolate chips and larger dark chocolate chips made by Callebaut, a maker of high-quality chocolate. These delicious morsels make a difference in the cookie’s texture and taste. She likes the flavor of bitter and sweet and adds that the two sizes of chips guarantee there will be a chocolate chip in every single bite, which adds to the overall pleasure of the cookie. The recipe also calls for 14 pounds of sugars (half granulated white and half brown), 10 pounds of butter, and pure, not imitation, vanilla. Sheena explained that pure vanilla is better because it has less of an alcohol chemical flavor than the imitation vanilla flavoring.
Anna Abram, Executive Pastry Chef, noted that people often think that cookies are simple to make but they actually have very specific requirements to turn out well. For example, the butter must be precisely the right temperature and the batter cannot be over- or under- mixed.
The bakery’s chocolate chip cookie recipe has developed through trial and error and originally came from BG’s dietician Emily Barrett when they were developing recipes for the launch of the Market Place Café several years ago.
The dough is made in a 60-quart standing floor mixer that takes two people to lift. Two-ounce ice cream scoops are used to place the heavy batter on industrial size cookie sheets that hold 200 ready-to-bake cookies. This process ensures that the cookies will all be the same size. The pastry chefs double stack the cookies on metal trays and then freeze them. When more cookies are needed, they are simply popped into the oven without defrosting them.
Sheena has always been involved with cooking. She was born in Ireland, where her aunt owned a bakery. Her great aunt was also a baker but she was blind and cooked by touch. Sheena said she was very consistent and it was fascinating to watch her work. Sheena’s family moved to the states when she was 10. At age 17, she came to BG and initially worked as a server in Wininngham Court and later worked her way into the kitchen. She has now been here 15 years and is second in command in the bakery.
The pastry area has two other chefs, Anna Abram, the Executive Pastry Chef, and Lindsey Behrendt, who is the pastry cook.
According to Sheena, one of the joys of working in the bakery is developing new recipes. Right now, they are working on a recipe for a croissant stuffed with chocolate chip cookie dough. “They are really good,” said Sheena, “but chocolate chip cookies are still the star.”