Chinese Chocolate Chip Cookie Challenges

I decided to stay at the Buddhist monastery, and things got busy after making that choice. A daily schedule was created that started with morning chanting at 4:30 am and ended with silence throughout the monastery and lights out at 10:00 pm, or whenever I finished my Chinese homework, whichever came later.

Weekends were less structured. We spent Sunday doing maintenance around the monastery. Tasks like building a wall, polishing various Buddhist statues, and sweeping. I’ve never done so much sweeping!

Saturdays were spent touring other temples or traveling around the small rural city we were leaving near. Then one Saturday they convinced the westerners to bake chocolate chip cookies.

Cooking was simple at the monastery. We divided the thirty people into six cooking groups, and every group took a turn cooking for everyone else. At the beginning of the week, someone suggested that I should make cookies. I agreed thinking there would be no way to get all the ingredients. I gave my Chinese teacher a list of the things needed, and she translated them for the person going to the market.

Then I began the typical tasks of working in the kitchen. One of those tasks was cutting 50 eggplants with a butcher knife and not losing a finger. Yeah, fifty. I thought they said fifteen, that would have been reasonable, right? No! 25 people require at least 50 eggplants for dinner. These weren’t the big bulbous ones you see at the supermarket they’re thinner than a banana and a little longer. A lot of the vegetables in China were different from what I saw at the grocery store in America. Some I didn’t even have a name for like the scorpion tails that they fed us regularly.

Of course, these weren’t really a scorpion’s tail. That would require killing something, and Buddhists don’t kill living creatures. Not even bugs. I found out after getting into the habit of calling it a scorpion tail that the vegetable was a lotus root. They sliced it thin, and the cross section looked like a circle with holes punched out. It tasted like a water chestnut or uncooked potato, whichever sounds less appetizing to you.

I spent the week cooking with the Chinese and gathering ingredients for cookies. I was more of a hindrance in the kitchen than anything else and was usually deported to the sink whenever I was done butchering the countless number of vegetables they needed for the meal.

I didn’t mind it, I’ve always liked washing dishes.

There were a few challenges with making chocolate chip cookies in China though. The glaring one is: “They don’t have chocolate chips in China.” However, this was the easiest of all the problems to solve.

A short list of other things I didn’t have easy access to in China were:

• A recipe for chocolate chip cookies
• Measuring cups
• A mixer
• A full-size oven
• Easy access to brown sugar
• Easy access Baking soda

Step one was to find a recipe. The Great Firewall of China blocks Google, Facebook, and almost everything else that would have been useful to overcome this challenge. However, in college, I made chocolate chip cookies with a girl, and after eating them, I believed they were the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. I’m not confident I wasn’t being biased by something else. I wrote the recipe down on my phone and never deleted it.

I handed over the recipe to my Chinese teacher who translated the list of ingredients. In the end, there were three that we didn’t keep stocked at the monastery: brown sugar, baking soda, and chocolate.

There were also no grocery stores in the town where we were living. Most of the food we ate was fruits and vegetables that we bought from local farmers. The spices and other staples were common enough that we could buy them in bulk ahead of time or find them at the corner store.

One of the women that was on cooking duty with me tried to explain to me that brown sugar was caramelized cane sugar (it’s not) and that we could just leave out the baking soda because it’s such a small amount (you can’t).

My Chinese teacher made a special trip into town for the chocolate and other ingredients. She returned with a small bag of brown sugar and a lot of chocolate.

My understanding is that there’s not a lot of demand for chocolate, or candy in general, in China. So what they do have is very nice… and expensive. There was a lot of drama about where the budget for the chocolate came from, and most of it never got translated. The budget got balanced in the end, and despite trying to give people money for it, no one would accept my cash because we were the ones doing the baking. The real reasoning was likely too complicated to cross the language barrier.

Baking soda was now the only missing ingredient. But it wasn’t the only remaining problem to solve.

Unfortunately for me, the Chinese didn’t use measuring cups. The monastery kitchen didn’t have metric or imperial cups. Multiple Chinese women told me, “Chinese do all their baking by eye.”

“Well, Americans don’t,” was always my stubborn reply. I considered going into the details of how baking was a chemical reaction, and I couldn’t guess at the amount of baking soda we would need compared to flour. I’m sure some baker somewhere could, but it wasn’t me.

Alternatively, we could have ordered some measuring cups online, after all the measuring cups we used at home were all made in China. However, after the chocolate budget fiasco, I didn’t feel like adding that to the shopping list was a reasonable demand for me to make.

Then we found out someone at the monastery had a scale. Luckily that’s what the Chinese use when they can’t bake by eye. So we had a solution to that problem. But solving these challenges was like fighting a hydra. When one got resolved more always popped up.

The recipe I had listed the ingredients by volume and all I had for measuring was a scale for weight. I needed to figure out the density of all these ingredients… without Google.

In the end, and for more reasons than the chocolate chips, I caved and got a VPN. A VPN routed my internet so that I could get past the Great Firewall of China.

I began researching what the density of flour is on the temple’s shotty WiFi. It turns out that different brands have different densities and google didn’t have anything on the Chinese brand of flour I would be using.

At this point, you’re likely thinking: “Nicholas, why didn’t you just search for a recipe using weights instead of volume?” And I agree that definitely sounds like something I should have done. But I didn’t. I stuck to my guns with this random recipe I got from a girl I knew during my sophomore year of college.

I never claimed China was the only one responsible for dealing me challenges while I was there.

Finally, Saturday afternoon arrived, and it was time to bake some chocolate chip cookies. The Chinese were taking their afternoon nap, and the westerners had control of the kitchen. My Chinese teacher was also there to help because she was interested in the process. She was also vital to getting to the point we were at.

I chopped up the chocolate while my western counterpart found all the other ingredients. Guess what’s still missing.

Baking soda and the scale!

Once again our teacher was there to translate us through another challenge. No one ever explained to us that the scale and baking soda didn’t belong to the monastery. They were a part of someone’s personal stash. We woke him up from his nap and got a hold of the final ingredients. Now that we had assembled the necessary ingredients there was nothing that could hinder our progress.

I turn to the westerner that I was baking with, “Hey let’s preheat the oven.”

“Okay, how hot do you need it to be?”

“350 Ferenheight.”

“What’s that in Celsius?”

There was a long break before I answered and I used it to walk somewhere that my phone could get a WiFi signal. I then googled the conversion.

“175,” I come back and tell him.

“The toaster only goes up to 125.”

“How big of a difference is that in Ferenheight?”

It turns out it’s a significant difference.

Our toaster, the only thing close to an oven on the temple grounds, was not equipped to cook our cookies. To make matters worse the wiring in the entire temple was bad, but the kitchen was the worst. The toaster was precariously plugged into the same strip that had the fridge and the industrial rice cooker which was engaged in cooking our rice for dinner.

There wasn’t any way we could turn back now. We had bought all the ingredients, and there’s not really a return policy at the Chinese market we shopped at. The only thing to do at that point was to set the oven to broil, turn the temperature to its max, and hope it doesn’t blow a fuse. We started balling out cookie dough.

After some poking and prodding with the dough and adjusting the cook time we finally got something that resembled a cookie.

Like most of the food I ate in China it didn’t resemble its American counterpart in anyway. The cookies weren’t crisp and caramelized like chocolate chip cookies were supposed to be. It didn’t even flatten all the way and looked more like toasted balls of dough. But it was cooked all the way through and had chocolate and sugar in it. We didn’t think anyone would complain.

About halfway through the batch of cookies, a nun walked in. She was visiting from another temple and had been living with us for a few weeks. She didn’t speak a word of English. She said something to our Chinese teacher who explained the situation to us. We listened eagerly to find out what we were in trouble for now.

To our surprise, we found out we weren’t in trouble. Our teacher explained that the nun was fasting during dinner this week and that was when we were serving our cookies. She wanted to know if she could have one before she started fasting.

I think there’s a special circle in Buddhist hell for people who don’t give fresh chocolate chip cookies to nuns.

You’ll be happy to know I won’t end up there.

In the end, everyone was happy about the cookies, even the westerners. The result was nothing like a typical cookie the westerners we pleased for a taste from home and the Chinese enjoyed the treat.

China threw a lot of curve balls at me in my time there, but each time that I stuck with something and got through the challenge, it rewarded me with something a little bit of happiness and a great story. If I had given up at any point in the process of making cookies, I would have never gotten to share the treat with everyone at the monastery.

They did a lot of things to help me while I was there, translate, plan tours and cook for us. The least I could do was bake cookies in a precariously wired toaster oven.