Claire Saffitz Makes CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES | Dessert Person

Okay, I know, I have to fix it because this is a really important episode. We're making

chocolate

chip

cookies

, possibly the best

dessert

ever. Hello everyone, I'm Claire, welcome to the kitchen of my house. Today I'm making

chocolate

chip

cookies

. I don't know why it took me so long to get to this recipe, but I really felt that as the steward of everyone's most beloved baked good, I had a lot of work to do and I'm very proud of my childhood cookie, so I'm going to show you how do i make it, no mixer needed, i really wanted a cookie with a crispy edge, a gooey, chewy center and the right balance between the vanilla caramel and brown sugar flavors and the whole chocolate mixture.

It is a very easy recipe, but it has some very specific points within the process, not that I am fussy, but I am very picky about small adjustments to obtain what for me is the ideal chocolate chip cookie, which means things how to use two different types of chocolate. I like to add the milk chocolate and dark chocolate, chop some of the chocolate to get large chunks and then fold in little smaller chunks and, very importantly, brown the butter. So why is yours the best? Although a good question, mine is the best because I think. It has the right balance between chocolate and dough.

I like the mix of milk chocolate and dark chocolate because for me too much dark chocolate is too intense and I don't enjoy it and it has the best texture, the crispiest edge, the chewiest center and lots of it. the brown butter flavor plus tons of salt, tons of salt, that's another key, but there are a lot of those little moments throughout the recipe that add up to make for me what is a superlative chocolate chip cookie. , without special equipment, without a mixer, that was important to me. This recipe can be made by hand for almost anyone, so I'm just going to use a bowl, a whisk, a spatula and then I need a saucepan to brown the butter, a couple of baking sheets, and if you have one, a tablespoon two ounces.

If you don't have one, you can use a quarter-cup measure. Pretty simple ingredients: I have butter, two large eggs, a little baking soda, two tablespoons of heavy cream, you can also use milk, kosher salt, vanilla extract, granulated sugar, dark brown sugar, all-purpose flour and then discs baking of milk chocolate and dark chocolate, so this milk chocolate is, I think, 40 to 45, something so it's actually relatively dark for milk and then this is a semisweet chocolate, I think 64. I couldn't find milk chocolate. baking discs, so I just bought a loaf and cut them up, but I'm actually going to cut them up even more.

I'll tell you why I have a heat resistant spatula that I use because I like to scrape up the butter mixture and stir. It's constantly there to keep the milk solids from sticking to the pot and burning off the flavors of a chocolate chip cookie, yes, chocolate, but more importantly, you also get this caramel cookie dough and you get that chocolate chip flavor. caramel, above all, with butter, of higher quality. The more butter, the more milk salads you will have, so butter is an emulsion of milk fat, water, and milk solids. Water now boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

The actual temperature of the butter will not exceed that temperature until all the water you want has been boiled. moderate the heat and keep it on the lower side because it can go from not brown at all to brown and burn very quickly. I'm going to lower it a little. I can still hear it boiling but it is spoiling less. It's getting a little quieter and instead of having big bubbles I'm starting to see more fine foam, this is about to start to brown so now I have it on low and let it go until I see one or two shades beyond the golden brown I want. to get a very dark butter but not burnt so it looks good I think I'm getting to that point I'm going to turn off the heat there's a little foam on the way but now you can see in the pot these are brown bits you'll probably know if you do you burned because one will smell a little pungent and two will look black.

This looks great. Now I'm going to add an ingredient that you don't normally see in chocolate chip cookies or any cookies. and that's heavy cream, two tablespoons, it's cold, I just took it out of the refrigerator, now I've taken all the water out of the butter and I actually want to add some back in to help build a little bit of structure. which interacts with the flour to create gluten and I'm adding eggs so there's water, there's a lot of water and egg whites but basically I need a little extra moisture to help create an emulsified dough.

At this point the recipe follows a very simple cookie method which is incorporating the sugar into the fat by adding the eggs and then adding the dry ingredients and chocolate, but before I do that I want this mixture to cool because if I were to make starting cookies with hot butter wouldn't get the texture I want. I'm going to buy something that's more crumbly and also has that greasy quality to it, so this needs to chill. It is a very slow ice dispenser. Sorry, I'm mixing in a metal bowl which is good for an ice bath because the temperature change happens quickly and will transfer.

A glass bowl will take a little longer, but sit here and stir it because what will happen if you leave it is it will go like solid butter in contact with a bowl and then liquid. up and I want everything to be smooth, so all you need is a whisk to do this. The mixture is opaque and had a few bits that were colder, so I'm whisking until everything comes back together and is smooth and homogeneous. I can still beat it but it has completely cooled. You can also see that now the cream has emulsified and I have something very smooth, so to this I add equal amounts of brown sugar and granulated sugar and I'm using dark brown sugar with brown sugar. it becomes chewy with white sugar and you get something crunchy.

I just split the difference and figured I'd use equal amounts, so it's three-quarters of a cup each. Go ahead and add them by whisking this. I don't need to beat this until it's light and fluffy and pale like I'm making a cake because I don't want a lot of air in the batter so as long as your mixer is very smooth and homogeneous that's all you need to do now I'm going to add my eggs These are large eggs, beat them one at a time until well incorporated, you will see a transformation in the texture, it will take on a silkier appearance as the sugar dissolves into the additional water you are adding from the egg white.

You can see that once you've browned the butter, the rest comes together very quickly. Then I want to add my vanilla, so maybe you caught our vanilla episode. I have my homemade vanilla extract here. Please use a good quality vanilla extract. I don't think you have to go for a whole bean, although if you wanted to splurge and add that wouldn't be bad, I think a high quality vanilla extract is really key for this recipe, don't use imitation stuff so beat it up. a tablespoon is a lot, but it's a very important addition in the way it tips the entire flavor profile toward that caramel.

Yeah, I guess I don't know. That can be reserved. I'm going to mix the dry ingredients very simply. I have two cups. of all-purpose flour, frankly, when I make this at home I just add everything to the boiled mixture, but I'll follow the somewhat advisable but also additional step of mixing them separately. Now a teaspoon of baking soda is really important. to making cookies for a couple of reasons mainly it determines the spread of the cookies if I made them without baking soda they wouldn't spread much in the oven and now kosher salt I always use Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt and with diamond i I'm adding two full teaspoons kosher salt if you are using morton use one teaspoon because it is saltier.

I'm going to make one a little complicated, but I think it's an important step to cut out some of the chocolate. You can use sprinkles. I really don't. I have a problem with chocolate chips, although I prefer something shaped like this, they are sort of like discs, sometimes called febs which means beans, so they are more bean shaped when whole in meltable cookies like these. chocolate sheets, so I really like using disks in cookies. I couldn't find the milk chocolate discs, so I had a bar that I cut up and I have five ounces of each type.

I love milk chocolate. I know it may seem like a purist chocolate. Less than that, I don't really care, I like it, I like the sweetness, I like the creaminess, I like how it melts, so I'm using both. I want one thing. I learned something my husband taught me early on. It's like why choose not. a or b is answer c, which is all of the above. I'm going to cut half of each type of chocolate because it's kind of like the principle when I make cake batter, it's like I really like having different sizes of the ingredients inside the cookies because I experience them differently when I eat them, so I really like having all that contrast in the cookie.

What I really like when I cut the chocolate is that it's like a little bit of powder like this, normally this is annoying, but in this case I like it because when that is added to the dough, it mixes with the dough and almost

makes

pieces. of the dough taste chocolatey, but then it gets like that too, so I'm ready to finish the dough. The dry ingredients come in at this point. I can beat it. The dough for these cookies is usually quite loose. If the butter was quite solid, you may need to switch to a spatula as my butter was quite solid, so let's go back to my spatula to fold in the chocolate, but make sure you get everything out of the mixer.

Well now I really like how it looks, it keeps its shape but is a little loose, that's normal. Now add the chocolate. You can see it's not a difficult recipe, it comes together pretty quickly once you have the butter. I just make sure I have those chocolate powder particles in there, sometimes there are doughs that I don't want to eat and then sometimes I make chocolate cookies and I sit here and little by little I pick out a piece of chocolate, a little spoonful of the dough and it's so good that we can't bake this yet we're not going to have chocolate cookies, well we will have them soon because I made a trade, but if you're making them at home and you get to this stage, I'm sorry to tell you that I'm going to ask you what do you expect There is an important process that occurs when you age cookie dough and chill it.

We'll talk about why as I pick them up, but this is a pretty crucial step. I understand the impulse. to skip it but maybe don't go ahead and wait if you don't have a tablespoon you can use a quarter cup you can also make them smaller there's no reason you can't make a one and a half ounce serving. I'm just doing it like I wrote in the book. Make sure you have level tablespoons and then I'm going to place them on this baking sheet now because I'm cooling them. I don't need to space them out. I would if I was baking them so you could place them together and in fact they would probably all fit on a quarter sheet so you can see this is like a big mound of dough so why am I asking you to age the dough to cookies?

Things happen when you let cookie dough sit in the refrigerator before baking, what happens is the butter solidifies, some of the sugar recrystallizes and almost a curing process occurs and the end result is a cookie that is chewier and has been developed more. The taste and flavor in every way is superior to a cookie that I bake immediately, I say at least 12 hours and up to 48, but even a couple of hours will help if you can muster up four hours, that's fine, so I'm going to split them up in portions. before aging the dough because if you put this whole bowl in the refrigerator it would turn into a solid block of dough that would then be very difficult to portion out, so room temperature dough is much easier to work with for this stage.

I realize these are giant cookies, but I think cookies this size give more contrast than cookies this size between the crispy edge and the chewy, gooey center, so I didn't place them in the best pattern, but I have 18 equal portions of dough, two ounces each, as much as you can What you want to do to give your cookies a really photogenic look is for every couple of cookies you take a disk of chocolate and you just stick it on top and then that melts into the cookie and we'll give you a really classic photo in looks like a cookbook, so now I'm going to cover this and chill the dough once it's set so the butter can harden.

You can take them off the baking sheet and put them like a tupperware or in a bag and then store them that way and free up some space. I'm going to put a cover here. Okay, will it work? Yes, luckily I planned ahead and made some dough and chilled it. I made the dough at this point three days ago. after two days in the refrigerator, I transferred them to the freezerbecause I didn't want them to sit in the refrigerator too long, so I have some frozen cookie dough and I'm going to show you how to bake them, so the first thing is to preheat it to 350.

I have a confession to make. I forgot to chop the chocolate when I made them, so they won't have the kind of chocolate distribution that's ideal so you can see these dough balls, they look a little bit. a little different because they don't have those little pieces of chocolate that were spread throughout, so it will have more different textures between the chocolate and the cookie, but that's okay, they spread out and get pretty big, so I don't want to overcrowd them. too many, I can fit six of these on a baking sheet, so I'm at 350. These go in the oven.

I'm going to rotate them halfway because sometimes the one on the bottom gets less hot so it browns less so I rotate them all halfway and they last 18 to 20 minutes and I'm looking for a golden brown edge and a pale interior slightly shiny and then harden as they cool, the centers have puffed up a little and that is due to the eggs and they will settle as they cool at this stage the biscuits are quite delicate so I don't want to touch them. I'll let them cool on the baking sheets for about five minutes and then transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling one thing you get when you age cookie dough is you get more of that wrinkled edge that I love so they look great even without my chopped chocolate edition, so I'll wait for them to cool.

I haven't eaten my

dessert

for lunch. However, I'm really excited to eat one of these and I want to pick the one I like the most to show you how it tastes, maybe it's this one, it has this crispy edge and this still gooey and warm center and I love the way it feels. They brown and become golden brown and caramelized and then the center is still soft and delicious so I love that they come out like crunchy and soft and chewy plus the melted chocolate is everything I want in a cookie so I'm going to go ahead and I'll try well, it's still really there. hot, I probably should have waited, but I can't, okay, my goodness, they are so hot, oh my, good cookie, while a hot chocolate chip cookie is certainly up there with the best desserts of all time, but even a cold frozen room temperature, all The chocolate chip cookie above is so delicious.

I really love having a mix of milk chocolate and dark chocolate here and then to have the contrast between the sticky sweet and bittersweet chocolates and all that brown, buttery cookie dough. There is no cookie more challenging for me. In my book I really hope you try this recipe, give brown butter a try, it's a great upgrade to any cookie recipe, you especially have chocolate chip cookies and it's worth reaching for good chocolate and good vanilla extract for these, thanks for watching, love. showing you dessert recipes and we'll be back with more and in the meantime I'll pour myself a glass of milk thanks for watching, like and subscribe.