Chocolate chip cookie dough may just be my favorite food in the world. Everything from the buttery vanilla flavor to the soft, melt-in-your-mouth texture makes it the most delicious thing ever. No matter what the recipe, I generally love the dough. Mostly I stick to the basic recipe on the back of the Nestle Toll House chips bag with mixed results. Sometimes I get super flat cookies that may be due to cold pans, over-warm butter, expired baking powder, or whatever else. Other times I end up with crusty over-done cookies. In general, the cookies come out pretty standard and never taste as good as the actual dough did, at which point I regret not just eating the whole batch raw. I like my cookies super soft so I make a habit of pulling them out of the oven before they're done in an effort to maintain softness. People like my sister and husband don't really go for the under doneness so it's always a battle. In my effort to find the ever elusive, perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe, I have endeavored to test out four different recipes (not including the old Toll House one)to see if I can find an improviement to the standard. I am kicking off this competition with my results for the first attempt, the Cooks Illustrated recipe (http://www.ourbestbites.com/2009/03/chewy-chocolate-chip-cookies/).
So the standard chocolate chip cookie dough recipe calls for 2 sticks of softened butter, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 3/4 cup white sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla, and 2 eggs, then throw in the chips. The differences in this new recipe include half a stick less of butter, melting the butter, more brown sugar, less white sugar, 1 full egg plus just the yoke of a second, and backing at 325 degrees. The concept behind the melted butter and less egg is to make them soft and moist, similar to brownies.
The initial crafting of the dough went smoothly. I found it far easier to use
melted butter than to plan ahead before making my cookies and take the butter out to thaw several hours in advance (I often forget to do this and end up having to just microwave it while trying not to melt). My first concern arose when I went for that much coveted, first taste of dough. It seemed kind of grainy and not soft and fluffy like I am used to. My Mom was assisting me and took issue with the fact that once the chips were added, they seemed to "sit on top" of the dough rather than get incorporated into the mixture. We went to scoop the dough on to the cookie sheet and ended up having to mash the chocolate chips into the dough balls so they wouldn't lose their chips. With all of that settled, into the oven they went. Mom and I were so eager to try them and see if they would in fact be a success after our skepticism over the dough.
We let these babies bake for the recommended 10-13 minutes and they looked awesome! They hadn't turned into doughy puddles, they had a nice light brown color, and they looked soft. I'm not sure if you know this, but you can see softness in a cookie and it looks like deliciousness. The chips sitting on top of the dough had the effect of not getting coated with dough so they were more easily visible and made the cookies look like quintissential chocolate chips! I let them go for an extra minute or so just to be sure they were completely cooked then pulled them out and indulged while they were still warm. My Mom and I savored those delicious first bites and agreed we had to go back for more cookies just to be sure we liked them. I let my husband have one then took the remainders into work to get a broad rating of how this chocolate chip cookie recipe stacked up. The cookies were very well received and I am sad to admit that in one day, I personally consumed over six of these tastey mosels. Everyone enjoyed the texture and kept remarking about the perfect amount of salt. This wasn't necessarily part of the recipe but whenver I bake, I like to use kosher salt because it has a little more punch. So, in our first round of the competition, the Cooks Illustrated (melted butter) cookies are out to a strong lead!
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