How does splitting up the categories affect ovens that have both a convection bake setting and a conventional bake setting? Can you participate in both categories as long as you clearly show what setting the oven is using during the run?

I kinda feel like splitting up these two categories isn't a productive change. Using the broiler setting is much faster anyway and doesn't necessarily use the convection features in an oven that has both conventional and convection settings. If the end goal is to ban the use of professional/industrial kitchens, then that should just be the rule.

I think a good compromise would be to have the bake setting used be displayed as part of the run on the leaderboard, and if convection ovens clearly have a huge advantage, THEN splitting the categories would make sense. Until then I think it'd be more fun to allow everyone to compete on one leaderboard.

As funny as it was to come up with so many exploits to be used in these runs, I agree with this. A more cohesive ruleset will help normalize the competition and create better runs while still making edible cookies. As someone who spent WAY too much time looking for every loophole and possible time save, here are some of my suggestions and reasoning behind them:

1. Pre-measuring ingredients should remain allowed. I believe that banning this would discourage further runs, but more importantly, it would lead to a meta that simply wouldn’t be fun to run. The issue is that if pre-measured ingredients get banned, the optimal strategy would have to become eyeballing ingredients, because measuring would be much too slow. Dumping out a quarter bag of flour and thinking “yeah that’s probably close to 4 cups” would inevitably lead to a lot of wasted food on attempts that go wrong. I don’t think measuring can be required or verified either, because runners could simply get around this by using a kitchen scale to see how many grams of each ingredient they’ve poured into the bowl. Any ruleset that requires explicitly showing the measuring of ingredients during time would become nearly impossible to verify.
2. Final cookies should be judged much more harshly. This is the big one, I think there’s a lot that should change here:

a. “Cookies must be 3 inches in diameter” should be fleshed out. I think the best way to do this would be to require showing that every cookie can completely cover a 3” circular cutout.

b. “Cookies must be fully baked” is harder. Any chef can tell you that food continues to cook even after it’s removed from heat, which means that even after the cookies are removed and the oven is closed and time has stopped, the cookies still bake while they cool. One way around this loophole would be having time stop when all 12 cookies have been verified to be fully baked and the right size. This would lead to a lot more over-baking, but it could result in more interesting runs where verification must also be done efficiently. You could also stop time when cookies are removed from the baking sheet in one piece, but this would be pretty easy if parchment paper and a steel spatula is used, even for cookies that are undercooked at the time. As for SHOWING that a cookie is “fully baked,” I think it at the very least needs to be removed from the baking sheet in one piece.

c. Verification should be required for ALL cookies. Each one should be measured, and each one should be removed from the baking sheet in one piece to demonstrate that it’s fully cooked. If this is turning into a serious category, we should do better and show that more than just some of the cookies are fully baked. All of them need verification.

d. Cookies should not be allowed to touch or overlap. I think this one is more important than people may think. In the extreme case, someone could just bake a single huge sheet of one cookie and then cut out 3” circles with a cookie cutter. If two cookies are touching AT ALL, they are (in my opinion) one cookie. Yes, this would include the two cookies in my WR 4:45 run that have are barely touching on the edge.

3. Ingredient requirements: This might be more of a personal request, but I’d actually prefer if salt wasn’t required, because I usually use salted butter in all my cooking. Buying unsalted butter just so I could add the salt for the rules felt wasteful, and I’d much rather just use the salted butter I always have on hand and omit the extra salt.

4. I don’t think time should stop at the beginning of the bake. High-temperature baking is, for me at least, part of what makes this category so much fun. Going from using the oven at 400 to 550 to the broiler was honestly hilarious, and I was frankly pretty impressed with the quality of cookies I was producing even with these extremes. Also, I don’t think modifying the timing would work for the 100 cookies speedrun, if that is to remain a category. No normal participant can fit 100 3” cookies in their oven at once, so high-temperature baking would still be required to optimize that run.

5. Convection ovens should be allowed. I think it’s unfair to disqualify people based on the type of oven they have, especially now since the meta is defined by using a broiler and convection ovens offer no significant advantage.

There’s probably a lot more being discussed, and if the mods would like me to chime in and offer any additional thoughts on fleshing out a better ruleset, I’d be happy to. I’m also more than happy to have a first pass at any candidate rulesets so I can point out any loopholes that may still exist, and mods can decide whether or not they’re okay with that.

Also huge thank you to all the mods for putting up with all the ridiculous rule-bending and chaos that the last few weeks have brought! It’s been a lot of fun mastering this category and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Wow, WELL DONE! I guess I'm gonna have to pull out all the stops to take this one back. Congratulations on the first sub-4!