How To Make Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

- Let's be honest,

chocolate

chip

cookies

are always good, but when you have a really good one, it's life-changing. We pretty much buy all the

chocolate

chip

s in New York City. We baked, we tested, we ate, and now we have the ultimate chocolate chip recipe for you. We're going to use some additional flavors, but really all you need for

cookies

is sugar, flour, fat, eggs, and chocolate, and in our quest to find the best, we had to try all of these ingredients. what to do with a cookie and how we can use its best properties to create the definitive recipe.

Let's talk about sugar. We have white sugar, light brown sugar and dark brown sugar. Really the only difference is the addition of molasses. Light brown sugar has a little molasses and dark brown sugar has a little more molasses. For this test, we wanted to see what effect simply using one sugar in each dough would have on a cookie. With all the white sugar, the one that was spread the most, it didn't have much flavor. The light brown sugar was a little chewier and spread a little less. Then the dark brown sugar had a really overwhelming taste, it spread less and visually you can see a big difference too.

And what we found was that you can't really get that classic flavor just by using one. The next thing we had to tackle is the flour. We have all-purpose flour, bread flour, and cake flour. Really the only difference here is the amount of protein and therefore gluten in these flours. Think about it like this. The bread is really nice and chewy, it has a great texture, a great structure by having gluten and protein, whereas the cake you think is tender, light, airy and will have less of those things. What it really comes down to is flavor and texture.

All Purpose gave you, you know, a standard cookie. The bread flour resulted in a significantly chewier cookie. The pastry flour was the one that spread the most, it was quite delicate. And then, similar to sugar, we decided that to get the best result, you should use a combination of two. And so on with fat. We wanted to see the difference between softened butter and melted butter, and then we wanted to see what would happen if we changed it completely and used coconut oil. Between softened butter and melted butter, visually they look quite similar. The melted butter spread a little more, and then upon tasting it we didn't notice much of a difference either.

Tried it with coconut oil and it worked, it was a cookie, but it lost that great oomph that butter brings to all baked goods. So in the end, we definitely prefer to use butter. Eggs, we went pretty simple with this one. Just one egg and one egg yolk contribute to a richer, fluffier cookie. Obviously we're making chocolate chip cookies, we have to have chocolate chips, but we're also going to add something extra with some dark chocolate pieces. Cut it with a serrated knife into small pieces and add it to the dough. It's really nice, because you have a variety of flavors and textures everywhere.

In reality, it's just about some fundamental ingredients and learning to master their properties to obtain the best result you are looking for. And finally, after all that testing, we came up with our final recipe. Here we go. Then we will start by sifting the flour. We will

make

all-purpose and bread-making flour. Salt and baking soda too. We really liked the chew factor of bread flour with a multi-purpose blend, to give us the best of both worlds. And then we'll move on to the butter. So we'll

make

melted butter, but we'll go one step further and brown it.

All you need to do to brown butter is throw it all into a saucepan and let it boil. After a few minutes of boiling, the milk solids in the butter will begin to toast and turn a beautiful nutty brown color. Keep stirring to make sure the butter browns evenly, and once you can see the very dark brown bits at the bottom, you'll pour it, ideally into a liquid measuring cup. This will do two things. First, you will quickly cool the butter to stop the cooking. You don't want to burn it. And then we also want to make sure we have a cup of liquid when it's all said and done.

So while you're making the browned butter, you end up boiling off a good amount of liquid, so we're just going to top it up with a little bit of water until it's about a cup. Just let it cool slightly and come to room temperature before continuing. So we discovered that we really needed a combination of white and dark brown sugar to get that great flavor we were looking for. Then add the vanilla at this point and the espresso powder. Espresso powder is one of those little flavor enhancers. Again all about those contrasting notes that really pair well with anything really sweet.

And then you'll add that liquid gold, oh my goodness, how delicious, and you'll put them together. That's another reason we want the butter to be a little colder. It incorporates very, very well with the sugar. When we were testing, if you add the browned butter when it's too hot, the dough can be a little greasy. Then, add the egg and yolk. And the smell this thing gives off, oh my goodness, it's very close to the best smell you can get from cooking. And then he sees the flour. We like to do it in about thirds, so there's no flour all over the kitchen, and just whisk it until you don't see a ton of extra flour.

It doesn't have to be fully incorporated, a little bit of flour that isn't really incorporated is fine. You will finish incorporating the rest of the flour when you add the chocolate. The nice thing about using these pieces is that you get little bits of chocolate that get everywhere, mixed in with the chopped chocolate pieces, and it's like, oh, that's good. And voila, that's your dough. Try not to eat it all when it is raw. Alright, if you're an A+ student, you can put them in the refrigerator to chill overnight for the best flavor. But if you don't have self-control like me, you can delete them right now.

The great thing about this dough is that it has so much flavor that we've incorporated into it, that it will still be very, very good if you bake it right away. If you're going to be awesome and store them in the refrigerator overnight, we recommend taking them out first and putting them on a baking sheet, then putting them in the refrigerator. It's much easier than trying to get a very hard dough out of the refrigerator. Cookies are kind of the equalizer for all baked goods. There are a lot of fancy things out there, but honestly, is there anything better than a

perfect

chocolate chip cookie?

Just look at that. You have these little pockets of chocolate by using those big pieces of chocolate. It has all the cracks and wrinkles you want in a chocolate chip cookie. The center is sticky. The outside is crispy. It has all the flavor and texture you could put in a small cookie and you will never use another recipe again. Here's a list of the top five smells in the culinary world, and I'm pretty sure butter comes in first place all the time. This is just a list I made, but. (laughs) - I was going to say, what? - It's a top culinary list.

Ask anyone, my goodness, browned butter, oh so good.