Allegedly the perfect chocolate chip cookie

[carbonel]

In my previous post about my current chocolate chip cookie venture, I mentioned my vague memories of a New York Times article about the quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. All I remembered was that it called for refrigerating the dough overnight.

The most excellent pameladean tracked down what she thought might be a reprint of it elsewhere. In fact, it's a different food blogger's commentary on the NYT recipe and her variation on it. But that article had a link to the original recipe, and thence to the actual article I'd remembered, if only vaguely. And while the NYT nagged me a bit about subscribing, neither article was behind a paywall.

It turns out that I had slightly misremembered the resting time. The recipe calls for refrigerating it 24 to 36 hours before baking, and the article makes it clear that (for that recipe, at least) 36 hours provides a significant improvement over 24 hours. The recipe also calls for chocolate disks (couverture chocolate) rather than chips, bread flour as part of the flour portion, the cookies to be made from large golf-ball-sized scoops rather than the standard tablespoon-size, and a sprinkling of sea salt over the dough before baking.

It was also clear that this was a recipe intended for making and then eating immediately, which meant that unless I had a houseful of guests, I was never going to be able to serve them in their ideal situation. So I never actually got around to trying the recipe, but I remembered the mandated resting time.

Someday I may be in the mood to spend the time and money to try baking these alleged perfect giant expensive chocolate chip cookies. In the meantime, should anyone else be game, I'd love to see your report.

Original NYT article.

Original NYT recipe.

Commentary and slightly amended recipe.

Comments

[bibliofile]

Yay pameladean! I was not up to much research last night.

I may try recipes; if I do, I will be sure to report back.

[pameladean]

I am very much in the habit of doing such research because I keep misplacing my cookbooks. The first time I just did it on a whim, but behold! someone had blogged about a Jane Brody recipe. The actual recipe was altered, but there were notes on each alteration, so I could reconstruct the original.

The cookie recipe is sadly not very Pamela-friendly. I could alter it, but that wouldn't tell you much about the original.

P.

[minnehaha]

I thought that the recipe you are (I think) thinking of also included browned butter. Perhaps I am mistaken, or perhaps there's yet another important choc. chip recipe.

For my part, I make the original Toll House recipe, excepting that I add an extra tsp. of vanilla. I also think that the dough, with added nuts but *without* the chocolate chips, make a fine , fine cookie.

K.

[carbonel]

The browned butter thing does sound a bit familiar. I suppose it would add even more caramel flavoring.

Extra vanilla sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing. Though it makes me think of Cifford Stoll. In The Cuckoo's Egg, he includes a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that calls for some outrageous amount of vanilla extract, like 2.5 tablespoons. When he was at Chicon, there was a pause in the Q&A session after his talk, so I asked him if that's what he really used or if it was a typo. He assured us that was the bare minimum of what he used.