When The New York Times ran an article on the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever last week, my coworker Jeannie suggested I give the recipe a try at home and then bring the cookies to work so she could try them too!
I took the challenge. I quickly scanned the ingredients list, bought a bag of Nestle semi-sweet morsels (my first step away from the actual recipe I was lazy, what can I say?), and set about making the dough on Sunday night.
But ugh, I didn't read the recipe carefully enough: it calls for cake flour and bread flour, and I only had all-purpose on hand. After a quick call to mom, who speculated that the low-gluten cake flour plus the high-gluten bread flour would cancel each other out and likely result in a gluten content roughly the same as that found in all-purpose flour, I decided to go ahead with my second substititution. My whole philosophy with baking is, though I do love that it's a science, I also feel that with enough experience you can generally figure out when it's okay to swap in a different ingredient than what's called for. So, I did it.
Next day at work, I had no cookies. You see, part of the trick of this recipe is letting the dough rest in the fridge for a day or two or three. (The other trick is to use more salt than you would ever consider using a full teaspoon and a half, plus more sprinkled on top! I was unsure, but I did follow those directions to the letter.) I did tell my coworker Alison about what I was doing, and she was not impressed. "You mean you're testing the world's best chocolate chip cookie recipe but you're not following the recipe?" She had a point, but I argued that baking sometimes means substituting one ingredient for another and hoping you know enough to make it work.
So, Tuesday night I baked the cookies just a few cookie sheets worth, because honestly, as I've mentioned before, I can't stand running back and forth to the stove every 15-20 minutes to swap cookie sheets. I baked them up big, though not quite as big as 6" across, as The New York Times specified. Still, they were very large. They baked up brown, crispy on the edges and chewy in the middle, as promised in the article. And the salt did enhance the chocolatey, buttery brown sugary flavor. But the weird thing was, they tasted kinda like store-bought cookies. At first I thought I was imagining it, but then Kim tasted one the next day at work, and she said the same thing unprompted. So there you have it: Good cookie recipe, but if you want that delicious homemade cookie taste, stick to your current favorite recipe.
Posted by Melanie
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