Eli and Henry and I finally took time out from our busy schedules (ha) to make the best chocolate chip cookies ever, at least as reported by The New York Times and Smitten Kitchen. I’ve had them on my brain for a bit, mainly because I was so curious about whether refrigerating the dough for a few days would really make a better cookie (short answer: yes!).
Everything I know about baking (which is, ok, not that much) says that you mix dry and wet ingredients separately, both so that your dry ingredients get mixed properly (and you don’t get any weird gross pockets of baking soda) and because the wet ingredients activate the baking powder, so you want to bake it as soon as possible after mixing together (that’s the “double acting” part of baking powder…first action is the liquid, second action is the heat).
But apparently letting the dough sit allows the egg to be fully absorbed, and makes the cookies brown more evenly and also gives them a toffee flavor. I have to say, it was totally true. They had an amazing toffee flavor and were much prettier and browner than my cookies usually are. I also like that the recipe directs you to make six enormous cookies at once. We all liked that part, really. And, just as I was eating one and marvelling at the brilliance of putting salt on the top of the cookie, and thinking, “I am so going to salt every single cookie from now on,” Dave piped in that he thought they were too salty and did I actually put salt on the outside of the cookie, and what kind of a crazy idea is that? So follow that direction at your own discretion. I’ve gotten to be a bit of a Salty Salterton the past few years, so I was all about the outer salting.
I’m sorry to say we weren’t able to find the giant dark chocolate disks locally, but I think our usual Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet baking chips were more than fine. We also did mix cake flour and bread flour as directed, but next time I’m just going to use all-purpose flour, because isn’t that essentially what all-purpose flour is? Cake and bread flours mixed together? (Dave, can you do the math for me on this one? If cake flour is 8% protein, and bread flour is 12.8% protein, do they equal all-purpose flour at 11.7% protein when mixed together?) I think the only problem with this recipe, really, is that it is way too tempting to have a big bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough in the fridge at all times.
(My awesome coffee mug is from Bradley’s Pottery, the coaster, as mentioned before, is from Robot Candy, the cute little plate is something Eli found at Goodwill, and the table is from the side of the road.)
This is a great tip, looking forward to trying it. Just stocked up for all my holiday cookies!
Forgot to say, Trader Joes has sea salt brownies. Awesome.
Salt makes everything else taste great, why not baked goods?
Sounds tasty. When I was a kid though, my Mom would have really had to hide that cookie dough. Like bury it in the yard hide it. I don’t think it would have lasted a few days if we knew where it was. The raw dough was almost as good as the cookies.
Eating raw dough is undoubtedly a rite of childhood. My mom likes to talk about when I started making chocolate chip cookies on my own, and a recipe that was supposed to make 60 cookies would make about 8.
And if only there were a Trader Joe’s near here! Sea salt brownies sound great. Sometimes I see sea salt caramels places, but it’s usually in, like, the Dean & Deluca catalog so they’re $6 each.
Trader Joe’s has sea salt caramels too.
I keep meaning to try making these cookies, but I think I might have the opposite problem: I’d forget the dough was in the fridge, where it would get buried behind jugs of apple cider and boxes of take-out leftovers, and I’d end up with a weird science project instead.
Mostly I’m admiring that pottery pumpkin mug. Want.
Best mug ever. Love it.
sea salt and chocolate chips – drool. Love the salty/sweet. Do not love waiting more than 10 minutes for cookie satisfaction however.
It is possible to eat them in sooner than 10 minutes. Perhaps even advisable, though it is messy, but in a melted-chocolate kind of way, which is ok by me.