Jay's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Jay's philosophy of a superior chocolate chip cookie: A thin (but not flat), non-cakey, rich cookie. Sweet, salty, crispy but still pliable and a little chewy. Good chocolate, but balanced, with each element standing strong but working together. You want a second cookie but do not need one.

So the first thing is that my recipe is mostly an adaptation of this one, by Claire Saffitz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPauR6tP_cg&pp=ygUlY2xhaXJlIHNhZmZpdHogY2hvY29sYXRlIGNoaXAgY29va2llcw%3D%3D

It is a very informative video (be sure to watch all of it, there's not a lot of filler and a lot of little things you'll need to know).

The other really good source of info I've found is this woman, really useful little baking tips generally https://www.instagram.com/handletheheat/

Ingredients

The first big thing to know about making the cookies is that ingredients matter, a lot.

Every ingredient can potentially totally change the final result, both texture and taste wise, and it's a gigantic help to understand what each ingredient actually does, this is what will allow you to customize your cookies to your liking. So I'll start with my basic understanding of each one.

Flour: The basic purpose of flour is to give the cookie structure. The first few times I made this I used Trader Joe's non-organic unbleached AP flour. This was fine and I was satisfied with the cookies it produced, perhaps my favorite of the like 6 batches I ended up making. I switched to organic for the latest batch, and they were still good, but what I immediately noticed is that the organic must have more protein (gluten), and gluten is what determines the structure of bread. (Bread flour has tons, cake flour has barely any, AP flour basically splits the difference). I think I preferred less gluten for this cookie (which is very buttery, basically molten solidified butter with just enough flour to hold it together). Just a heads up.


Sugar: Beyond sweetness, sugar percentage has a gigantic effect on both the size/spread and texture of a cookie. I think Claire mentions this too, but white granulated sugar is going to give your cookie a crispier texture, brown sugar gives a softer pliable texture (desired, and because of the high butter content it's going to get crispy on the edges anyway) So my personal proportion (this is a difference from Claire's recipe) is about 1.25 brown sugar to 1 white sugar. I use the same amounts of everything else, just slightly more brown sugar. This makes the cookies darker & more flavorful, with a better texture and better spread too.

Butter: As you probably know, not all butter is made equal. Really good butter has higher concentrations of butterfat and milk solids which give the cookie that deep toffee flavor that you want. For the best iterations of these cookies I used this French salty butter I got at Von's https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.960285758.html
This shit is very salty and you will not need to add any additional salt to the dough, I prefer this to using unsalted butter and adding a precise amount of salt, simply because the butter has a better flavor than I've tried and afaik, does not come unsalted. A lot of pasty chefs will recommend Plugra, but just personally I don't love the flavor of its fat, especially when melted into a baked good, it's too distinct. As far as actually browning the butter this is another REALLY IMPORTANT thing. Claire suggests getting the butter quite brown before you bake, but in my experience this can (and has) led to the butter overbrowning when you actually bake it and creating an overpowering even acrid flavor. I recommend JUST browning the butter, as in take it off no more than 10-15 seconds after it actually starts browning (the temperature for this to happen gradually is actually really specific, too low and it will basically never start to brown, too high and it will burn too fast to control, the water has to completely evaporate first, and you'll learn how it works after a couple of tries.) Have an icebath prepared (it is better to have a metal bowl to cool it down but glass will work too and adding water to the ice will help) then just stir it up till it thickens. Good cookies need cool butter, but you don't have to go crazy, as long as it's basically solid. I also use half and half to rehydrate the butter instead of heavy cream (seems fine, there's so much butter you don't really need full fat cream anyway).

Chocolate: I like to use a combo of dark and a milk truffle with a dark center. About 2:1 dark to milk ratio, you can experiment with this. Trader joes has great cheap bars you can just cut up into small-ish bits and add directly to your dough. I like their Belgian bar https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/shopping?q=tbn:ANd9GcSvm6Yt_KJYbbs40zWmliUVYjRX_JSC0u4g3K2MszaaGIcA0Vt0dr9ibhS31tW8edk8LjhfTG6yYgvCdOW8XotooqOieDM5hTa38gR4JEUyCunBn7sgjYQGVQ (73%) for the dark and their milk truffle bar https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/organic-milk-chocolate-truffle-bar-070558 for the milk. I wouldn't go higher than around 73% cacao for the dark as it starts to get overwhelming, but if that's your thing go for it (people loved it even with the 85% Ugandan as the dark). An important thing is when making the cookie balls, top them each with a few chunks of chocolate. This will caramelize and look shiny and sexy and is a lot more visually impactful.

Vanilla extract: Claire suggests using the best shit you can find, even making your own etc. I don't think this is necessary personally, because unless you have some beans lying around good vanilla extract is prohibitively expensive. I use a cheap Mexican one (maybe avoid like McCormick or something) and it works great. A slightly heavy hand with it is not a bad thing either, I'm sure there's an upper limit but you can use basically twice as much as the recipe suggests with no downside.


Eggs: One of the less fussy elements, I think it's better to stir the egg till homogenous (I just use a fork) before adding it to the butter personally, but I guess you don't have to....idk.


Baking soda: Soda spreads, powder puffs. When I made these at first I was making a half batch of the Claire recipe (a whole batch just is too much, a half batch will make like13 cookies, more than enough for literally anyone.) Be sure to pay attention to halving the portions, too much of this is bad news, flavor and texture wise, but some is necessary.

Baking Technique

Aging the dough(cooling it down and letting things hydrate and flavors meld)...if you have time it does make a huge difference, the cookies need to be pretty much cold going into the oven at least. I have frozen batches for like 2-3 hours in a pinch then baked, but overnight in the fridge is best.

Don't overcrowd the pan, I make no more than like 4 cookies per half sheet pan, 5 if I'm pushing it, you really wanna give them space to spread without touching, and it's hard to do that with a decent sized cookie past 4 or so.

One big thing I had no idea bout is you really need to cut fairly precise parchment to fit your pan. Overhanging paper will alter air/heat currents in your oven and lead to at least one weird distended cookie.

A big game changer for me is the shaping technique, which is like completely unintuitive IMO. About half way through baking (when some crinkles have formed on the edges but it's still fairly soft and pliable) take the cookies out and use a butter knife to push the edges in and shape them into more precise circles. These cookies spread a ton when baking and by reshaping them you get that proper toothsome texture (you don't want them to be TOO thin), and they look a lot better too!


The actual baking time IMO is more of a feel thing, you can also take them out and check, then put them back in with basically no penalty. A small bit in the very center can be a little under fully baked and that's fine, just make sure to let these cool for quite a bit, as again they don't have a ton of flour structure so they need the butter and sugar to set to not fall apart.

Happy baking.