>Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies are my favourite food. Raw, baked, hot, cold; I don’t care, I love them. The perennial question: which is the best recipe for chocolate chip cookies? I have tried many. All the common ones. The New York Times recipe is my favourite, but its a complex cookie that takes some time (due to the 36 hours chilling). So I am constantly on the lookout for a second favourite recipe; one that can be whipped up quickly when the cookie craving calls, but that still bakes up chewy cookies with great flavour.

The amount of recipes out there baffles me. And commonly the only difference between them is 1/2 cup sugar or a little extra flour. I scour blogs and baking books for new recipes, and each time I find one I try it I end up loving it (because I love chocolate chip cookies) and filing the recipe away. I have so many now and I’m still not sure which is best.

So one day I came across a few new recipes that i hadn’t tried before and decided to bake them both at once. That way I could compare them against one another, decide which one is better, and maybe one day figure out the absolute best recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Here is the winning recipe of the two, Cook’s Illustrated’s recipe for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies.

THICK AND CHEWY CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
This recipe comes from Baking Illustrated. It bakes an absolutely delicious cookie. Thick, chewy, moist and yummy. Make sure to try the tip for breaking and re-forming the cookie balls; it makes them look like they have come straight from a professional bakery. Most importantly, take the cookies out of the oven when they are JUST golden and still a little undercooked in the center, as they continue to cook when you take them out and you don’t want them to go crunchy (because that would defeat the purpose of “Thick and Chewy”).

165g unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), melted and cooled until warm
1 cup packed light or dark brown sugar (7 ounces)
1/2 cup white sugar (3 1/2 ounces)
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups + 2 tbsp plain flour (10 1/2 ounces)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1  cup chocolate chips or chunks (milk or dark)

Mix together the flour, baking soda and salt together and set aside.

Using an electric mixer or a wooden spoon, beat the butter and sugars together until smooth.

Add the egg, the egg yolk and the vanilla and mix until combined.

Add the dry ingredients and mix until just incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chips until mixed through the dough.

Refrigerate dough for half an hour. Preheat the oven to 170 C and line 3 baking trays with baking paper.

TIP: To assemble the cookies, roll 1/4 cup or large tablespoons of dough into balls using your hands.

Hold the dough balls with the fingertips of both hands and pull the balls into two equal halves.

Rotate the halves 90 degrees outwards, and with the jagged surfaces facing up, join the halves together at their base, again forming a single cookie ball and being careful not to smooth the dough’s uneven surface. They should look like this:

Place the formed dough balls onto the prepared trays, jagged surfaces up, spacing them about 2 inches apart.

Bake the cookies for 12 minutes or so, reversing halfway through baking, until the cookies are light golden brown around the edges and still soft and puffy in the centres. Cool the cookies on their trays. Makes 18 large cookies.

These cookies are DELICIOUS!!! They are thick, and have a perfect chewy texture without being under baked. They actually look like they have come from a cafe too. I almost preferred them to NY Times because they are so thick and chewy, but they only stay good on the first day. After that they go soft, so if you want to have these over a few days, keep your dough in an airtight container in the fridge and bake it in batches each day. Everyone loved these. They have become my new go-to recipe (with NY Times being saved for special occasions). Bake them. You won’t regret it.