Chocolate Chip Cookies (NYT 7/09/08)
Last week the NYT published a chocolate chip cookie recipe that the claim is the ultimate in amazing chocolate chip cookies. According to them, the 2 key tricks is resting the dough in the refrigerator for 36 hours before baking and making them enormous (large golfball size scoops of dough producing 6" cookies). The size is supposed to yield cookies with a crunchy outer rim, chewy inner ring and soft center. They also advise serving them warm.
For all sorts of reasons having to do with my being on a diet that's actually working and preferring to feed my 6 year old normal sized sweets, I'd rather make standard sized cookies than 6" cookies.
This leads me to 2 questions:
1. Has anyone made them and are they, in fact, the most fabulous thing ever to happen to a chocolate chip cookie?
2. Has anyone made them in a normal cookie size and how did that work out?
marcia2
Jul 17, 2008 04:03PM
Here's a link to the New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/din...
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Thanks. I have the recipe. I'm just wondering if they are actually incredibly good and if making them smaller would substantially lessen the wonderfulness.
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No - four pounds of ingredients and cookies that are 500 calories each!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/din...
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2 1/2 sticks of butter? No wonder they're fabulous! Don't think I could bring myself to make them, though.
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When I saw how much butter they called for, the recipe I've been using for years calling for 1 stick of butter seemed very modest!
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There was a long discussion about these cookies on the Food Media and news board (http://www.chowhound.com/topics/537165). The consensus was that they are indeed fabulous. So, always hoping to improve on my current "best" recipe, I tried them. I made the dough on Tues, baked them today. I didn't want to have huge cookies, as I wanted to "share the love" with as many guinea pigs as I could, so I made them regular cookie size. I baked them for 10 minutes instead of the recommended time and they were beautiful. Believe it or not, I didn't try even one, as I also am on a diet that is working so hence the aforementioned guinea pigs. Whether they are the best cc cookies they had ever tasted I don't know, but they were vewy vewy popular. They look delicious. Tomorrow I will be bringing some to a client, who will actually get to taste both my standard "best cc cookie recipe" and these.
The use of very high quality chocolate, I am sure, impacts the overall taste, as does the shape of the "chips" - which as the recipe recommends are not chips at all, but disks - so the chocolate is kind of in layers... oozier.
Hope that helped
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we made them and they were amazing:
Some things:
1) we couldn't find the recommended chips, so we went with a mix of some Dagoba 70% Dark Chocolate disks (too dark to use alone) and some Guittard semi-sweet large/flat chips that still fit the recommendation for shape. We also used slightly less than the recommended amount of chocolate, which is quite a bit.
2) We used cake flour as specified, but regular flour in place of the bread flour.
3) We made 5-6 inch cookies (5 per sheet)
4) I think the cooking time was 19:30 minutes (very much in line with specified)
5) We let cool on the rack for about five minutes, not the 10-15 I think the recipe specified and they were cool enough to eat.
6) We made one sheet three days in a row. The recipe has a typo I think in how many cookies are supposed to be- you can make 18 from this recipe. The color of the cookies did indeed get darker each time. The difference between 18 hours aging for the dough and 42 was noticeable. I think 66 hours was a little long, but the cookies still were fine.
They were really wonderful- I think even getting right up to overdone might even improve them- they might get some toastier notes. We cooked them completely through and they were still chewy in an honest way (not just because they weren't cooked).
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Do you think that whole wheat bread flour would be too 'rough'??
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I'm not a flour expert, but my guess is using bread flour would make the cookies even chewier. I was very happy with the mix of cake flour and all-purpose. I wonder about the taste with whole wheat?
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I could not resist the call of the Best Chocolate Chip cookies ever and tried the recipe as well.
For modifications, I used the all purpose flour I had on hand as well as semi sweet chocolate chips (not discs). The recipe made an enormous amount of dough which I suppose makes sense since you are supposed to be making enormous cookies. I made normal size cookies and I think I got about 45 cookies all together (made in several batches). The cookies were still great and I think that the sprinkling of sea salt adds a lot to the recipe.
All that said, I think next time I would definitely halve the recipe as I have been giving away cookies to everyone I know!
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I really favor making the big size. We had people over for a lunch and baked 6 cookies fresh for dessert. We then baked 6 the next night, and then six the next. 18 cookies in all. Enough to give away, but enough to savor a wonderful, warm cookie, with all the texture variation discussed in the article.
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I made them and they were excellent. The one difference was I shaped them like the Best Recipe's Thick and Chewy cookies--where you make a large ball, break it in half, and stack the two halves so you get a nice texture to them. I wouldn't say they were better than refrigerating the Best Recipe cookie for the same period of time and baking but they still are worth trying.
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I made them with bread flour, but not the whole wheat flour I considered. I didn't get the chocolate discs, chopped very good semi sweet chocoate into 'chips.' I prefer a much more crisp cookie than is produced from this recipe. But the addition of small amount of salt, sprinkled over the cookie before baking was delicious and I will bring this "trick" to next batch of whatever chocolate chip cookies I make in the future.
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I've made them twice now. Both times I made them normal cookie size (the better to fight off temptation). And I used the ingredients just like the recipe said, with the bread flour, etc.
Since it's so much dough, I tried baking some immediately, then baking some more one and two days later, and freezing the leftover dough. All the cookies turned out good. To be quite honest, though, I couldn't detect a real difference between the first batch and the last, even though the article made a big deal about hydration and whatnot. It's probably just me.
I'm not sure why, but my first attempt produced cookies that rose a lot and were kind of puffy. The second produced cookies that were crisp and chewy. Both tasted good.
Is it better than the original Toll House? Not sure. You should try it. I may combine the recipes, making the Toll House recipe, but using some bread flour and resting the dough longer. And as others have mentioned, the quality of the chocolate is important. I used three good dark chocolate bars, which I chopped up into chunks. That worked out well.
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