Chocolate Chip Cookies
Makes 6-8 cookies
6.8 oz all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoons kosher salt
1 stick unsalted butter
4 ounces light brown sugar
3.2 ounces granulated sugar
1 med egg
1.5 tsp natural vanilla extract
8 oz Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips, 60% cacao
Sea salt
1. Sift flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.
2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light,
about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla.
Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop
chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against
dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated
for up to 72 hours.
3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper
or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.
4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet,
making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more
attractive cookie. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to
20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to
cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking
remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.
Adapted by Scott Goode from a recipe in the NY Times, July 9, 2008
Each cookie 5-inch cookie (3.5 oz) 400 cal, 18 g fat.
Perfection? Hint: It's Warm and Has a Secret
By DAVID LEITE
Published: July 9, 2008
TOO bad sainthood is not generally conferred on bakers, for there is one who is a possible
candidate for canonization. She fulfills most of the requirements: (1) She's dead. (2) She
demonstrated heroic virtue. (3) Cults have been formed around her work. (4) Her invention is
considered by many to be a miracle. The woman: Ruth Graves Wakefield. Her contribution to
the world: the chocolate chip cookie.
One day in the 1930s, Mrs. Wakefield, an owner of the Toll House Inn, in Whitman, Mass., 23
miles south of Boston, was busy baking in her kitchen. Depending on which of the many legends
you subscribe to, the fateful moment may have happened when a bar of Nestlé semisweet
chocolate jittered off a high shelf, fell into an industrial mixer below, and shattered, or when
Mrs. Wakefield, in a brilliant move to make her Butter Drop Do cookies a bit sexier, chopped up
a bar of chocolate and tossed in the pieces. Whether by accident or design, her Toll House
Chocolate Crunch Cookies delighted her customers and became the culinary mother to an august
lineage that almost 80 years later is still multiplying and, in some cases, mutating.
Made from nothing more than flour, eggs, sugar, leavening agents, salt, and chocolate, the cookie
seems idiot-proof. After all, it's simple enough that an eighth-grader can make it, right?
Not necessarily.
''If it was just a matter of a recipe,'' said Hervé Poussot, a baker and an owner of Almondine, in
Dumbo, Brooklyn, ''we'd all be out of business. It's what goes into the making of the cookie that
makes the difference.'' Like the omelet, which many believe to be the true test of a chef, the
humble chocolate chip cookie is the baker's crucible. So few ingredients, so many possibilities
for disaster. What other explanation can there be for the wan versions and unfortunate
misinterpretations that have popped up everywhere -- eggless and sugarless renditions; cookies
studded with carob, tofu and marijuana; whole-wheat alternatives; and the terribly misguided
bacon-topped variety.
All this crossbreeding begs the question: Has anyone trumped Mrs. Wakefield? To find out, a
journey began that included stops at some of New York City's best bakeries as well as
conversations with some doyens of baking. The result was a recipe for a consummate cookie, if
you will: one built upon decades of acquired knowledge, experience and secrets; one that, quite
frankly, would have Mrs. Wakefield worshipping at its altar.
The first visit was to the City Bakery, on West 18th Street, owned by Maury Rubin, who seems
to get as much pleasure from talking about food as from eating it. When asked about the secret to
his cookies, he said, ''We bake them in small batches every hour so they're always fresh.'' He
went on to say that the store sells more than 1,000 cookies a day.
Why, then, does almost everybody say they prefer homemade to bakery bought?
Mr. Rubin smiled, having already figured out the answer. ''It's the Warm Rule,'' he said. ''Even a
bad cookie straight from the oven has its appeal.''
It's an opinion expressed by every baker visited. Jacques Torres, who has three branches of his
Jacques Torres Chocolate in Manhattan and Brooklyn, has a small warming tray set up near the
register so customers can get their cookies soft and gooey, although he offers them at room
temperature, too. Seth Berkowitz, the owner of Insomnia Cookies on East Eighth Street, goes so
far as to have a display case filled with baskets spilling over with stand-in cookies; the real deals
are sold straight from a holding oven.
Heather Sue Mercer, one of three sisters who own Ruby et Violette, which recently reopened on
West 50th Street, believes that her bakery's basic chocolate chip cookie ''is definitely better
warm,'' but, she said, ''I think some of our others are better served room temperature for the best
flavor.'' A warming oven allows all their cookies to be served either way.
Given the opportunity to riff on his cookie-making strategies, Mr. Rubin revealed two crucial
elements home cooks can immediately add to their arsenal of baking tricks. First, he said, he lets
the dough rest for 36 hours before baking.
Asked why, he shrugged. ''I don't know,'' he said. ''They just taste better.''
''Oh, that Maury's a sly one,'' said Shirley O. Corriher, author of ''CookWise'' (William Morrow,
1997), a book about science in the kitchen. ''What he's doing is brilliant. He's allowing the dough
and other ingredients to fully soak up the liquid -- in this case, the eggs -- in order to get a drier
and firmer dough, which bakes to a better consistency.''
A long hydration time is important because eggs, unlike, say, water, are gelatinous and slow-
moving, she said. Making matters worse, the butter coats the flour, acting, she said, ''like border
patrol guards,'' preventing the liquid from getting through to the dry ingredients. The extra time
in the fridge dispatches that problem. Like the Warm Rule, hydration -- from overnight, in Mr.
Poussot's case, to up to a few days for Mr. Torres -- was a tactic shared by nearly every baker
interviewed.
And by Ruth Wakefield, it turns out. ''At Toll House, we chill this dough overnight,'' she wrote in
her ''Toll House Cook Book'' (Little, Brown, 1953). This crucial bit of information is left out of
the version of her recipe that Nestlé printed on the back of its baking bars and, since in 1939, on
bags of its chocolate morsels.
To put the technique to the test, one batch of the cookie dough recipe given here was allowed to
rest in the refrigerator. After 12, 24, and 36 hours, a portion was baked, each time on the same
sheet pan, lined with the same nonstick sheet in the same oven at the same temperature.
At 12 hours, the dough had become drier and the baked cookies had a pleasant, if not slightly
pale, complexion. The 24-hour mark is where things started getting interesting. The cookies
browned more evenly and looked like handsomer, more tanned older brothers of the younger
batch. The biggest difference, though, was flavor. The second batch was richer, with more bass
notes of caramel and hints of toffee.
Going the full distance seemed to have the greatest impact. At 36 hours, the dough was
significantly drier than the 12-hour batch; it crumbled a bit when poked but held together well
when shaped. These cookies baked up the most evenly and were a deeper shade of brown than
their predecessors. Surprisingly, they had an even richer, more sophisticated taste, with stronger
toffee hints and a definite brown sugar presence. At an informal tasting, made up of a panel of
self-described chipper fanatics, these mature cookies won, hands down.
The second insight Mr. Rubin offered had to do with size. His cookies are six-inch affairs
because he believes that their larger size allows for three distinct textures. ''First there's the
crunchy outside inch or so,'' he said. A nibble revealed a crackle to the bite and a distinct flavor
of butter and caramel. ''Then there's the center, which is soft.'' A bull's-eye the size of a half-
dollar yielded easily.
''But the real magic,'' he added, ''is the one-and-a-half-inch ring between them where the two
textures and all the flavors mix.''
Testing once again bore out Mr. Rubin's thesis, which might be called the Rule of Thirds. The
24-hour and, especially, the 36-hour cookies developed the ring Mr. Rubin enthusiastically
described. The crisp edge gave way to a chewy circle, with a flavor similar to penuche fudge,
surrounding a center as soft as that of the first batch. His theory on the impact of size on texture
so delighted Ms. Corriher that she wanted to include it in her new book, ''BakeWise'' (Scribner,
$40), due out in October.
Super-size cookies seem to be the 21st-century rage. Mr. Torres and Mr. Poussot sell cookies as
large as Mr. Rubin's. Levain Bakery, on West 74th Street, offers six-ounce, slightly underbaked
behemoths that, while not adhering to Mr. Rubin's Rule of Thirds -- they're too mounded for that
-- do have some crunch around the edges.
And what would a chocolate chip cookie be without the wallop of good chocolate? According to
most of the bakers, only chocolate with at least 60 percent cacao content has the brio to
transform the dough into the Hulk Hogan of cookies. Some, like Mr. Rubin and Mr. Torres, have
their chocolate made exclusively for them. Others, including the Mercer sisters, use high-quality
imported brands, like Callebaut or Valrhona, and shoot for a ratio of chocolate to dough of no
less than 40 to 60.
Break apart a Torres cookie, and a curious thing happens. Inside aren't chunks of chocolate, but
rather thin, dark strata. ''I use a couverture chocolate, because it melts beautifully,'' he explained,
something traditional chips don't do. Couverture is a coating chocolate used, for instance, for
covering truffles. To get his trademark layers, Mr. Torres has his chocolate, which is
manufactured by the Belgium company Belcolade, made into quarter-size disks -- easily five
times the volume of a typical commercial chip. Because the disks are flat and melt superbly, the
result, he said, is layers of chocolate and cookie in every bite.
Dorie Greenspan, author of several baking books including ''Baking: From My Home to Yours''
(Houghton Mifflin, 2006), was asked to fill in any blanks left by the master bakers during the
quest for the ultimate cookie. Although unsure she could bring anything new to the party, she
went through the usual checklist: read through the recipe first, make sure all the ingredients are
at room temperature, use the best-quality ingredients you can find, don't overmix. Then she hit
upon something everyone else had missed, and some home bakers are nervous about: salt.
''You can't underestimate the importance of salt in sweet baked goods,'' she said. Salt, in the
dough and sprinkled on top, adds dimension that can lift even a plebian cookie. To make the
point, she referred to her recipe for Sablés Korova, a chocolate chocolate-chip cookie with a
hefty pinch of fleur de sel, from her book ''Paris Sweets'' (Broadway Books, 2002). Five years
ago, sea salt as a must-have ingredient and garnish for sweets wouldn't have registered on the
radar of many home bakers, but now it has become almost commonplace, in part because of Ms.
Greenspan's unwavering belief in its virtue.
After weeks of investigating, testing and retesting, the time had come to assemble a new
archetypal cookie recipe, one to suit today's tastes and to integrate what bakers have learned
since that fateful day in Whitman, Mass. The recipe included here is adapted from Mr. Torres's
classic cookie, but relies on the discoveries and insights of the other bakers and authors. So, in
effect, it's all of theirs -- the consummate chocolate chip cookie.
This creation, the offspring of some of baking's top talent, truly bests Mrs. Wakefield's. Doubt it?
There's only one way to find out.
