Do you ever want to make your own decadent chocolate cookie? Only a few changes to a basic chocolate chip cookie recipe can elevate your entire product and help you satisfy a craving for a crispy and chewy chocolate chip cookie. Through testing and learning on my own about the complexity of baking, I have concluded that only a few simple factors are necessary to make the best chocolate chip cookie ever.
Five Keys to Elevate Your Cookie
Browned Butter
Butter is arguably the most delicious ingredient ever, with its rich flavor and its smooth texture. Butter makes every dessert better and is essential for a chocolate chip cookie. While most basic chocolate chip cookie recipes tell you to cream softened butter with the sugar, using browned butter creates a more complex and unique flavor. Browned butter occurs when you melt the butter so much that you begin to drive off all of the water in the butter and it becomes clarified butter. Once you have a pure clarified butter, you continue to heat the butter until it creates brown specs at the edge of the pan. This browning that occurs is called the Maillard reaction, where the sugars in the butter brown to a certain temperature to create a toasty and more complex flavor. When making chocolate chip cookies, once you get the butter to amber color, put the butter in an ice bath so it begins to solidify into softer butter so you can cream the sugar with the butter.
Dark Chocolate
While many chocolate chip cookie recipes use milk chocolate or semi-sweet chocolate, I recommend a bitter-sweet dark chocolate. Dark chocolate gives a more balanced cookie as there is a melding of flavors between the sweet sugars and the slightly bitter chocolate. Most bittersweet chocolate is between 60-70 percent cacao where the sweetness of the chocolate is more leveled out.
Add enough salt
Salt plays a vital role in all baked goods you eat. Salt isn’t used to make food particularly taste “salty,” but to enhance the flavors you want to taste in the baked good. Salt can play a sort of secret role in baked goods. As LibreTexts Chemistry says, “Improved palatability, in turn, promotes the digestibility of food, so it can be said that salt enhances the nutritive value of bakery products.” You should put salt in chocolate chip cookies because it will balance the sweetness in the cookie better and enhance the flavor of the chocolate.
A mix of sugars
An equal mix of sugars makes the perfect chocolate chip cookie. If you like a chewy cookie, brown sugar adds a moistness from the added molasses. If you like a crispy cookie, white granulated sugar is hygroscopic, which absorbs sugar to create a more crispy cookie. When you combine the two sugars, you create a crispy edge and soft and chewy center of the cookie. This texture adds more interest while eating because it adds more dimension and contrast when tasting the flavors of a chocolate chip cookie.
Refrigerate the cookie dough
With the help of King Arthur Baking Company, I learned the benefits of chilling your cookie dough. When you chill your dough, the butter fat solidifies and helps the cookie spread less in the oven to create a more round cookie. Aging the dough also creates a more flavorful cookie. As the cookie ages, flour breaks down into its simple carbohydrate, sugar which is a flavor enhancer like salt. Finally, the aged cookie changes the texture because when the sugar has more time to meld together in the dough, it creates a refiner chewy/crispy distinction. I recommend chilling cookie dough for at least 12 hours to make the best cookie, but even chilling the dough for 30 minutes will enhance the overall dough.
My Own Recipe:
Ingredients:
2 sticks of butter
3/4 cup of brown sugar
3/4 cup of granulated sugar
2 whole eggs
2 teaspoons of maple extract (vanilla extract works as well)
2 cups of all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoon of salt (plus more if you want to sprinkle on after baked)
3/4 teaspoon of espresso powder (optional)
One 12 ounce bag of dark chocolate chips
Instructions:
Brown the butter in a medium skillet until the butter reaches a dark amber color. Once the butter is browned, put the butter into a bowl which is inside an ice bath and whisk the butter until it solidifies back into softened butter. Once the browned butter is softened, whisk in the sugars until homogeneous, with a few grains of sugar remaining. Then whisk in the eggs and extract until combined. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, salt, baking soda, and optionally espresso powder until combined. Then fold in the flour mixture and mix until just a few dry spots are left. Then add the chocolate chips and mix until the dough is fully combined. Then scoop out the cookie dough onto a tray with a 1/4 cup cookie scoop; make as many dough balls as possible. Refrigerate the dough balls for at least 30 minutes but preferably 12 hours. Once the dough is chilled, space 6 dough balls on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake at a 350-degree oven for about 13 minutes or until the edges are golden brown and the center is soft but baked through completely. Cool on tcookie sheet for 5 minutes and then move the cookies to a wired rack until ready to be eaten.
Overall, chocolate chip cookies are a fairly simple dessert and can be easily achieved by following the key components to make the best chocolate chip cookie.
