Let’s Get Physical Part 2: Cranking out Cookies

About a year ago I was looking for a doughnut or biscuit cutter to help us make our favorite fruit cookies.

Essentially a rolling pin with metal die on them you can easily roll it over a sheet of dough and presto you got a lot of the same shapes stamped out. Some like the one above have wood handles for small operations, and others fit into machines that do all the work for you:

However, in the doughnut and biscuit world, there are just a few shapes, and I was looking for more variety. You can also buy a hand squeeze cookie press but they don’t work as efficiently as the rollers.

I decided to check into our favorite little shop run by our friend Judy called Cookin’ in SF. It is on Divisadero Street and is jam packed with every imaginable cooking utensil, pot, cookbook etc. imaginable. She is an amazing resource for information.

courtesy of Marie N.

As luck would have it as soon as I walked in the door and told her I was looking for a doughnut cutter, she said she had just picked up some strange contraption that might work for me. It was loaded in the back of her van and looked like some old-fashioned torture device. It was in pieces, and she said I could take it home and see if I could figure out how it worked.

Fifteen minutes later I was home and asked Phineas to help me carry it into the house. “What did you get this time?” he said with an air of exacerbation in his voice since he was just getting ready to go to work. It looked like it had been in a musty garage for 30 years.

So I disassembled it and scrubbed every nut, bolt and odd-looking part. Three hours later I reassembled it and presto – I had a cookie making machine which a search online revealed was the industry standard Kook-E- King!

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These are called cookie depositors, because they form the cookie and deposit it on a bake sheet. They work the same as a hand cranked pasta maker works. You dump the dough into the hopper on top, and when you crank the handle, the two grooved rollers sitting on the bottom of the hopper push it through various shaped die you can attach. Lucky for me I got six different shapes, and decided on using the Easter egg.

There is a gear mechanism that stops the cranking after the cookie dough has pushed through the die to a certain thickness (the thickness you want your cookie to be) and a long wire slides along the bottom of the die cutting the cookies away. Gravity makes them fall onto a cookie pan you place under the machine. So I whipped up some cookie dough and after some adjusting got it working. Basically you put the pan under the machine and start cranking, Four cookies will fall neatly onto the pan, and then you slide it forward a bit and four more. You can put about 50 lbs of dough in the hopper, so you can make a lot of cookies! Here is a video of how it works.

These machines were designed for small neighborhood bakeries and the number of die they made for different sizes and shapes for cookies is dizzying.

Of course for people with more money or bigger operations, you can get an automated machine such as this.

Now for the bad news. Our Kook-E-King is sitting disassembled in our commercial kitchen waiting for the day for our oven to get hooked up. We do lots of baking daily at home and the baking phase of the business is on hold until we can get the bakery portion of our facility up and running. We need to run about 100 feet of gas line into our unit and then have the utility company install a meter. Three years ago we bought a Gemini rack oven

and a 60 quart Hobart mixer.

Some day it will all be up and running and then the Kook-E-King will be cranking out cookies.