I've made hundreds (thousands?) of batches of chocolate chip cookies. They're my favorite dessert!
I think this is a great article but I wanted to highlight some of what I've found to be key points for making the best cookies, at least for me personally.
1. Butter should be soft, not melted. Melted butter makes flat cookies. (Some people like flat cookies -- you can melt your butter. Heathens.)
2. Follow order of operations in the recipe. Butter is creamed with the sugar, then add wet ingredients, then add dry ingredients. Stir after each stage. Batter should be extremely smooth.
3. Ideally, batter should be chilled in refrigerator before using. But this is not required, unless you melted your butter.
4. Once formed, roll cookie dough balls in sugar before putting them on the parchment paper. Adds slightly crunchy, brown outer layer.
5. Sprinkle some coarse salt on top, to taste.
6. Use multiple types of chocolate chips. Specifically, I like a mixture of milk chips + semisweet chips. This makes the cookie flavor less boring.
edit: In terms of the base recipe, I use the Joy of Cooking recipe. Tollhouse chocolate chips also have a recipe on the packaging which is basically much the same.
Definitely agree on 1-3. I have found that chilling in the refrigerator also results in a better shape, plus I also like the way it divides the work (make the dough and clean up one day, then bake the next). I'll have to try 4, 5 and 6, those are great ideas.
My own tip to throw in the mix: if you naturally gravitate towards making big cookies (because who doesn't like a really big cookie?), try making small ones!
If all of this seems too complicated and you want an easy way to take cookies from fine / good to great, stick with your standard Tollhouse recipe, but let the dough sit in the fridge for a day or two (the linked article talks about this). Its a super easy way to give them a deep, toffee-like flavor.
Brown butter cookies are really good, but the nuttiness can be intense. Often I prefer regular creamed-butter recipes. Also, the #1 way people screw up browned-butter cookies is not letting the butter cool enough.
Also not a huge fan of the chopped chocolate. I prefer the pockets of chocolate that chips give rather than chocolate everywhere.
> stick with your standard Tollhouse recipe, but let the dough sit in the fridge for a day or two
About 18 hours seems to be optimal (for me!) As well as letting the dough rest at least an hour to get closer to room temp before spooning to the baking sheet.
What is never talked about when analyzing a good tollhouse cookie is the underside pattern. There should be a 1/8"-1/4" noticeable line around the bottom of the outer edge. This is the fault line of where the base of the cookie starts to solidify from baking and the subsequent spreading action of the dough past this point in time, which 'rolls over' this fault line. This metric can tell you a lot regarding whether your dough has too much butter, too much sugar, too cold, too warm, too whipped during the creaming stage, too mixed after adding flour, oven temp, cooking time, baking surface, etc. Once you start getting anal-ytical about your 'process', this one metric is an easy visual that can pinpoint what went wrong or how to improve when you start controlling for variables. The tollhouse recipe is nearly the perfect set of ingredients but you can get a wide range of results just on process alone yet most people go straight to tinkering with the ingredient list to improve. Resist.
As an aside, whenever I need to make a can't miss recipe, I google that dish name + seriouseats food lab. Never had a fail from Kenji and his methodology in constructing recipes.
This is a long shot, but some years back Robert X. Cringley had a column talking about a company (possibly out of Israel) who did training for a business optimization technique. At at some point one of the owners decided to try it on chocolate chip recipes, and it worked out really well. Does that ring a bell for anyone?
Butterscotch flavor from butter is done via esterification in high temperature, which does require both saturated fats, protein, right acidity and high heat.
(Same ester is added to e.g. popcorn as flavoring.)
I think this is a great article but I wanted to highlight some of what I've found to be key points for making the best cookies, at least for me personally.
1. Butter should be soft, not melted. Melted butter makes flat cookies. (Some people like flat cookies -- you can melt your butter. Heathens.)
2. Follow order of operations in the recipe. Butter is creamed with the sugar, then add wet ingredients, then add dry ingredients. Stir after each stage. Batter should be extremely smooth.
3. Ideally, batter should be chilled in refrigerator before using. But this is not required, unless you melted your butter.
4. Once formed, roll cookie dough balls in sugar before putting them on the parchment paper. Adds slightly crunchy, brown outer layer.
5. Sprinkle some coarse salt on top, to taste.
6. Use multiple types of chocolate chips. Specifically, I like a mixture of milk chips + semisweet chips. This makes the cookie flavor less boring.
edit: In terms of the base recipe, I use the Joy of Cooking recipe. Tollhouse chocolate chips also have a recipe on the packaging which is basically much the same.
My own tip to throw in the mix: if you naturally gravitate towards making big cookies (because who doesn't like a really big cookie?), try making small ones!
Brown butter cookies are really good, but the nuttiness can be intense. Often I prefer regular creamed-butter recipes. Also, the #1 way people screw up browned-butter cookies is not letting the butter cool enough.
Also not a huge fan of the chopped chocolate. I prefer the pockets of chocolate that chips give rather than chocolate everywhere.
About 18 hours seems to be optimal (for me!) As well as letting the dough rest at least an hour to get closer to room temp before spooning to the baking sheet.
What is never talked about when analyzing a good tollhouse cookie is the underside pattern. There should be a 1/8"-1/4" noticeable line around the bottom of the outer edge. This is the fault line of where the base of the cookie starts to solidify from baking and the subsequent spreading action of the dough past this point in time, which 'rolls over' this fault line. This metric can tell you a lot regarding whether your dough has too much butter, too much sugar, too cold, too warm, too whipped during the creaming stage, too mixed after adding flour, oven temp, cooking time, baking surface, etc. Once you start getting anal-ytical about your 'process', this one metric is an easy visual that can pinpoint what went wrong or how to improve when you start controlling for variables. The tollhouse recipe is nearly the perfect set of ingredients but you can get a wide range of results just on process alone yet most people go straight to tinkering with the ingredient list to improve. Resist.
This is a lighter presentation of the same: https://9to5google.com/2017/12/04/google-smart-cookie-recipe...
Butterscotch flavor from butter is done via esterification in high temperature, which does require both saturated fats, protein, right acidity and high heat. (Same ester is added to e.g. popcorn as flavoring.)
I said I would only upvote it if that user posted it.