Caroline’s Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies
The Recipe
Ingredients
1 cup (16 tbsp, or 8 oz, or two sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups flour (ideally bread or cake flour, but all purpose is fine. See Note 1!)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cornstarch
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce (optional, see note 7)
2 cups chocolate of your choice (Chips, roughly chopped wafers or bars. See Note 2!)
flaky sea salt (optional, see Note 5!)
Method
In a medium-sized skillet, melt all of the butter over medium heat. Continue to cook, swirling constantly, until the little solid bits on the bottom of the pan turn from a pale color to golden brown. Immediately remove from heat and set aside to cool. (See Note 3 for a few words of wisdom!)
While butter is cooling, combine the dark brown and regular sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer (or just a large bowl) and stir to combine. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking soda, cornstarch, and cinnamon and stir to combine.
After butter has cooled (see Note 3!), stir it into the sugars and mix until well combined. Add in the eggs and vanilla, and stir vigorously until no streaks of egg remain. Allow to rest for a few minutes, then stir vigorously (medium-high speed) again. Repeat this process two or three times, until the mixture is just warm to the touch and noticeably paler in color.
Toss in (not literally, unless you want to make a giant mess, just carefully dump it in) the flour mixture and optional applesauce and stir until no streaks of flour remain. Gently stir in your chocolate of choice until evenly distributed.
Transfer dough to an airtight container, or cover with plastic wrap, and place in the refrigerator to chill for at least four hours and up to two days. (See Note 4!)
Once dough has chilled, preheat your oven to 375ºF. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper (if you have it). Using a 1/4 c measuring cup or a cookie/ice cream scoop of similar size, portion out the dough and roll it into a ball (handling it as little as possible to keep the butter and chocolate from melting). Place dough balls several inches apart on the parchment-lined baking sheet.
Bake cookies for 12-14 minutes, rotating halfway through.
Immediately sprinkle with flaky salt once removed from the oven, then allow to cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes. Transfer cookies to a cooling rack and let them cool until they reach your desired temperature for consumption (See Note 6!).
Store in an airtight container if you (or your friends and family) have enough self control to not eat them all within a few hours.
Notes
I purposefully designed this recipe to work with both fancy and regular flour. The bread or cake flour will yield a more tender cookie, but if you only have all-purpose, don’t sweat it! The cookies will still come out fluffy and soft and absolutely delicious.
The chocolate in a chocolate chip cookie is by far the most important ingredient. Tollhouse Chocolate chips ‘get the job done’, but man, switching those out with some high-quality chocolate makes an unbelievable world of difference. My personal favorite chocolate for these cookies is Guittard Milk Chocolate Wafers (found at Wegmans), roughly chopped. Doing so gives you not only some hefty chunks that make for a great Instagram photo, but also tiny bits that just dissolve into the dough, giving you chocolate flavor throughout! I’m not a fan of dark, semi-sweet, or bittersweet (which is really just dark, let’s be honest) chocolate, but this chocolate is the perfect combination of sweetness with just a hint of bitter that makes it perfect for any baking application. But I gotta say, nothing will ever beat the fancy chocolate chips my brother and his wife brought back for me from Belgium.
The most important part of this recipe is by far browning your butter. It adds the perfect kick of nuttiness to the dough, giving a deliciously complex end cookie. It can be a little intimidating at first, but stick with it and I pinky promise you that your cookies will thank you for it. This will take a few minutes, but the point between beautifully browned and sadly burnt goes very quickly, so keep an eye on it and keep swirling! As far as cooling it goes, you want it to be warm but not hot, and not quite room temperature. Or you can just toss it in, but that makes step 3 take a little longer. I would also highly recommend getting some high quality butter. Your run-of-the-mill Land O’ Lakes will work fine, but butters like Kerrygold, Plugra, and other Europeans will have a higher content of milk solids, which means more toasty bits of browned butter!
Chilling the dough is a vital step to get the ideal final cookie shape. While you could immediately bake these, I really don’t recommend it. They will flatten out and become crispy, which is not the desired result for this recipe. Chilling the dough also allows for some sneaky flavor development! For a lofty-softy, beautifully flavored cookie, be sure to let your dough chill!
While the flaky salt is completely optional, I promise it will take your cookies to a whole new level!
Obviously warm, gooey, melty cookies are one of the few joys we have left in life. However, these cookies are purposefully a little underbaked, so please don’t be alarmed by how gooey they stay! The cooling time is very important for carryover cooking, so you do actually have to wait a little bit before eating them. Once completely cooled, they will still be very soft and chewy.
Okay, so the thing with the applesauce came about while I was on a cookie baking rampage right before Christmas. I was making some other cookies and they came out so cakey and soft and it gave me the idea to put just a little bit in my chocolate chip cookies. Not everyone is game for a cakey chocolate chip cookie, but man does the addition of applesauce make it the perfect cookie to me.
The Story
Almost a year ago when I first started working on this recipe, I wrote what you will see below. In the time since, a lot has happened both in my life and the world. I got to marry my best friend, and we bought a house together. The world is still in the midst of a pandemic that started over a year ago. America was thrown in to chaos for too many reasons to count.
The past year has brought a lot of changes, but the one thing that has remained the same is my love of cooking. While I may not always have the mental capacity to get myself moving in the kitchen, when I am able to put my heart and soul into feeding others, the joy it brings me is unmatched. Food is an art of love, and I just want to spread it.
I have a bunch of new content planned for the website but no timeline for it, so I hope you will stick around for some tomfoolery. But to kick off 2021 on a better note than 2020, let’s just enjoy some chocolate chip cookies…
I’m gonna be an honest blasphemer and start this by saying I don’t actually like chocolate chip cookies that much. It wasn’t until high school that I even started liking chocolate. I can eat regular chocolate in small doses now and I tolerate chocolate cake, but I still haven’t been able to get behind chocolate ice cream or most other chocolate flavored things. But anyway, I’m already getting off topic.
My obsession with finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie started a couple of years ago when my parents got me ATK’s “The Perfect Cookie” cookbook for Christmas. Obviously I jumped to my preferred kinds of cookies first, but I eventually found my way to the humble chocolate chip. Man, was that recipe life-changing! One single recipe changed my outlook on chocolate chip cookies.
But, unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the perfect chocolate chip cookie for me. I wanted something softer, but not chewier. I wanted something deeply flavorful but not overpowering, with the perfect ratio of chocolate to dough. I wanted something big, but not too big that I couldn’t eat a whole one. If I was feeling adventurous, maybe I could eat two.
And so began my month-long journey to finding MY perfect chocolate chip cookie. I started with Rick Martinez’s Browned Butter Toffee Cookies because Rick is an icon and I love him. However, they were a little crispier than I wanted mine to be. So I moved on to Alton Brown’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie. They were gloriously chewy, but I still wanted something softer. Enter Joshua Weismann’s recreation of Levain Bakery’s famed chocolate chip cookie. These were by far the closest I came to my perfect chocolate chip cookie. Pair that with Andrew Rea’s Basics with Babish Chocolate Chip Cookies, and J Kenji Lopez-Alt’s glorious science, and I had an epiphany. If I couldn’t find my perfect chocolate chip cookie in someone else, I would have to make it myself.
I learned something from every single one of these recipes, but none of them were my perfect cookie. Rick taught me the importance of not only browned butter, but also mix-ins (which are always optional). Alton taught me that you don’t always have to use all purpose flour. Joshua taught me that chilling your dough is the key to lofty cookies. Babish taught me the importance of dark brown sugar. Kenji taught me the secret to excellent surface texture.
So what did I do? I combined all of my newfound chocolate chip cookie knowledge and pawned the results off on my friends and family (and my husband’s coworkers) until I found my perfect recipe.
The final result is, in my opinion, the perfect kind of chocolate chip cookie. Big, lofty mounds of delicious cookie dough perfectly balanced with rich and melty chocolate. They get bonus points for staying super soft for days after baking. However, the best part is that it’s simple enough that even the most novice baker can find success with them. It introduces some new techniques that are building blocks for more complex bakes you may want to take on in the future. The recipe is also very easy to scale, so halving, doubling, or even tripling the batch is a breeze.
So there you have it, folks. My perfect chocolate chip cookie. I found the process of developing these not only very fulfilling, but entertaining! I drew on skills learned ages ago, and combined them with new knowledge to make something wonderful. Not only has it kept me occupied during quarantine, but it also brought joy to others as well because who the hell turns down homemade cookies?
Some people like crispy chocolate chip cookies. Some people like chewy. I like lofty-softy chocolate chip cookies, and that’s what these are. I hope you like them too.
