THE. BEST. CHOCOLATE. CHIP. COOKIES. - Really,They are That Good

I have one sentence for you. It is really quite simple. No fuss, no muss, just one little sentence that may just change your life, or at least your baking. These are the best chocolate chip cookies ever. Yes, I said EVER.

The recipe hails from a New York Times article from 2008. Before you get all excited thinking I have the time to read the New York Times and how you must have my time management tips and secrets, I don’t. I was just lucky enough to stumble upon Orangette, who wasn’t reading the New York Times either, but has a news-reading friend who told her she needed to read this article.

If you care, at all, about cookies or baking or recipe development or Dorie Greenspan, who, along with David Lebovitz (I know I’m name dropping but I love them), is teaching me how to make perfect macarons, then you should read the original article by David Leite. If you care about them being really beautiful, and arranging the chocolate pieces, Jacques Torres uses made-especially-for-him fêves, chocolate disks that create layers of chocolate through the cookie, so that they are just so, you can do that to. All I know is that Torres clearly does not have twenty fingers reaching up from between him and the countertop trying to pinch his cookies while he arranges his fêves. I eliminated this challenge by using really good quality chocolate chips which tasted just fine.

Now, not all, but lots, maybe even most good things come with a caveat. Some make it a deal breaker and, to be honest, it almost was for me. I wasn’t sure we, pretty much meaning me, could cope with a bowl of cookie dough sitting in our fridge. Yes, that’s right, sitting in our fridge for thirty-six, that’s 3-6, hours. It may seem like an age, especially when you are waiting for cookies, but you can just push it to the back and come back a day and a half later. 

Do it. Don’t let the time defeat you. You will love them. They are delicious. They are crispy. They are chewy. They are salty sweet perfection.

As I mentioned, I used chocolate chips instead of disks. Try and use the best quality you can find or afford. I used fine sea salt instead of coarse salt in the dough, I couldn’t see that this would make a difference. I used Maldon sea salt for the tops. The original recipe is given in cups and in ounces. I used cups because I don’t have a scale here in San Diego. My cookies were a little smaller than the recipe wants.

The. Best. Chocolate. Chip. Cookies. adapted from Jacques Torres, David Leite, Orangette (makes about 28 4-inch cookies)

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons cake flour

1 2/3 cups bread flour

1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt

1 1/4 cups unsalted butter

1 1/4 cups light brown sugar

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract

3 1/4 cups good quality chocolate chips

Maldon sea salt

Sift flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt together.

Cream butter and sugars together for about five minutes, or until very light.

Add eggs, one at a time and mix well after each egg. Beat in the vanilla.

Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. 

Mix the chocolate in. 

Press cling film against the dough and refrigerate for 36 hours, or up to 72 hours.

When you are ready to bake, preheat oven to 350º.

Scoop large golf balls of dough onto the baking sheet a couple of inches apart.

Sprinkle each with sea salt and bake until browned but still soft. It took about 16 minutes for me, you will want to keep checking.

Cool on baking sheet for ten minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack.

Repeat until you have baked all your dough. Eat, you may want to use a napkin.

Good Bad Cookies

There are times when life gets in the way of pretty much anything else. Visitors, and lots of fun, and travel, and lots of fun, and trying to clean your house up into the no-really-this-is-how-we-live-our-children-don’t-make-mess state required for potential buyers to be able to consider living there gets in the way of just cooking dinner, much less writing about it. Now that the house is tidy and we seem to have tracked down all the odors emanating from behind furniture and all the,’ Oops, I appear to be stuck,’ patches have been scraped off the floor and we have returned from what seemed like a cross country road trip which was, in reality, just a few hundred miles up the coast, and our fridge is empty of leftovers, I am back in cooking mode. At least until my new, but not particularly successful, knitting hobby takes over.

Shortly after New Year and in the midst of my determination to not resolve to do anything, I realized that I had to do something with the jar of a certain chocolate-hazelnut spread that someone, silly person, had put in Stephen’s Christmas stocking. Left on its own, it was going to meet no better end than a teaspoon straight into someone’s waiting, and knowing better, gob. At least if I baked it up into something else, it would disperse the no-goodness and it could be more easily shared around.

I made the cookies but I couldn’t post them, too many resolutions would be swearing them off. Something this bad but good needed an audience. So, I waited and, well, I have waited long enough. It is February people (at least it feels that way at home, I am told), and you all need something to do on your snow days (I miss snow days, I really, really do). Plus, you will deserve them after all that shoveling (I miss shoveling, really I do). Plus, if I had some snow to shovel, I would then deserve to eat more of them.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Hazelnut Spread Cookies

1 1/4 cup crunchy peanut butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup chocolate hazelnut spread

Preheat oven to 375ºF.

Beat peanut butter, brown sugar, egg and vanilla together. 

Mix flour, baking soda and salt in another bowl. Mix in to wet ingredients.

When wet and dry are fully mixed, stir in the chocolate chips and chocolate hazelnut spread.

Roll into balls and place on baking sheet lined with parchment. Flatten with a floured fork. 

Bake for about 10 minutes. Careful, these are pretty easy to overbake.

Cool.

Makes about 24.