I saw on TV the other day that Papa John's is making a new mega-sized chocolate chip cookie now. I wonder how that is made. Did you look into that any? http://ir.papajohns.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=793916
Norma and Charg,
I saw the ads too but I did not pay any further attention to them. However, since you and Charg commented on this matter, I went to the PJ website and did not see any nutrition information on the cookie. However, I did see a review of that cookie along with nutritional information at http://www.manreviewsfood.com/foodreviews/review-papa-johns-mega-chocolate-chip-cookie/
. Without an ingredients list, it is difficult to reverse engineer a product such as the PJ cookie on nutrition information alone. However, there are some takeaways that manifest themselves from the nutrition information.
For example, the PJ cookie contains cholesterol. That means an animal source such as butter or eggs. Companies like PJ try to avoid fresh eggs because of potential cross contamination issues but the eggs could take a processed form (such as pasteurized fresh or dry eggs) to get around that problem, or it may be that coming from a commissary the eggs in the ready-to-bake dough is not a problem. However, dry eggs also contain cholesterol. If the only cholesterol in the cookies is from butter, the total of 104 mg for eight cookie slices would be equivalent to about two ounces of butter for the entire cookie. There is no cholesterol in the chocolate chips--if they are a quality chocolate chip, such as the Nestle's (http://www.verybestbaking.com/Toll-House/Products/MorselsAndBaking/Semi-Sweet-Morsels.aspx
--and there is no cholesterol in the flour or in sugar or in salt if added, which I suspect they are.
It is also possible that in lieu of butter, PJ may be using a form of margarine that has 0 trans fats. Margarine does not contain cholesterol so that would leave more room for the use of eggs, which are very high in cholesterol. But the amount of eggs would be small.
The sodium content of the PJ cookie as given in the nutrition information suggests an equivalent of about 3/8 of a teaspoon of ordinary table salt. There is a trace amount of sodium in the flour used to make the cookie, which I suspect is an all-purpose flour or maybe even a weaker flour, but there is no sodium in a chocolate chip product like the Nestle's chocolate chip "morsels". If a salted butter (or margarine) is used, its sodium content will be a part of the total Sodium number. Most likely there is some salt added to the cookie dough recipe. If baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) or a baking powder is also used, which is very common for a chocolate cookie dough recipe, there will be a sodium component from that source also. So, maybe we are talking about 1/8 teaspoon of added salt.
It is hard to decipher where the fat resides in the PJ cookie but the ratio of Total Fat to Saturated Fat is similar for butter (if used) and for chocolate chips. But there is no way that immediately comes to mind as to how to apportion the fats between the two products, and especially if we do not know if butter and/or eggs in some form are actually used. It is also possible that PJ is using an oil form of fat, which also has Total Fat and Sat Fat components. There are no Trans Fats in butter, or eggs or flour or salt or sugar or oil, so that is consistent with the 0 Trans Fats shown in the nutrition information for the PJ cookie.
With respect to the Sugars component of the nutrition information, there are natural sugars in the flour, but in small quantities, and there are sugars in the chocolate chip morsels. There are no sugars in eggs or butter. If all of the Sugars were in the form of ordinary table sugar, we would be talking about a total of about 11 tablespoons of table sugar. No doubt, a part of the Sugars come from the chocolate chip morsels, but it is likely that ordinary table sugar (sucrose), or maybe a combination of sucrose and brown sugar, are also added to the dough recipe.
As for the Dietary Fiber component of the PJ nutrition information for the PJ cookie, that would come primarily from the flour, since there is no Dietary Fiber in butter, eggs, sugar, oil, or chocolate chip morsels. Unfortunately, because of rounding factors (under FDA regulations, Dietary Fiber is expressed to the nearest gram), it is hard to say how much flour is actually used to make the PJ cookie dough. I would guess maybe 5 ounces of flour.
For flavor, I would imagine that PJ uses vanilla in some form (natural and/or artificial). There are perhaps preservatives and coloring agents in the cookie dough also.
The review referenced above did not specify a weight for a single cookie slice. But, at http://www.brandeating.com/2013/09/news-papa-johns-new-mega-chocolate-chip-cookie.html
, the weight of a single cookie slice is given as 39 grams. If that number is correct, it translates to about 11 ounces for the entire cookie. The 11 ounces is the baked weight. Naturally, there is a loss during baking. I do not bake cookies so I can't say what the loss is during the baking of cookies. Some research suggests a loss of around 12-13% but I don't know if that would apply to the PJ cookie.
As you can see, there are many unanswered questions when you only have nutrition information to work with. If someone is really interested in divining the intricacies of the PJ cookie, I would suggest that he or she get in touch with PJ and ask what is in the cookie. If an ingredients list is provided, that should indicate the predominance of the ingredients in the product by weight. PJ is sensitive to matters like this since they were recently burned by a writer who took PJ to task for not revealing what is in their products.