the New York Times chocolate chip cookie
January 19, 2009Few things have I consumed in my life that have made me this happy. The recipe is genius, not to mention easy to execute, and the resulting cookies have made me famous at work. There are a lot of food products in this world which I suspect contain some sort of addictive substance (i.e., the crack in the food at Chez Panisse). But since I’m the one actually making these cookies, and have no recollection of adding crack, I’ve no choice but to conclude that this is simply the world’s best chocolate chip cookie.
An expert baker I am not, but there’s two things which are relatively unique to this recipe: a mixture of all-purpose flour and cake flour, and having the dough sit for 24-36 hours. The former gives you silkiness, the latter is meant to allow the flour in the dough to soak up the flavor from the butter, vanilla, and so forth.
When you’re at the halfway point and your dough is finished, “silky” doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s lacking that heavy grit a lot of doughs have, and um … yeah. I don’t eat lots of cookie dough. Not at all. Anyway, another great thing about this recipe is that it encourages the use of organic, sustainable chocolate. It names Valrhona as a preferred choice, the 70% dark I believe. Every time I make these though, I use half dark and half milk. The first time they were out of feves, so I got home with baking blocks and chopped them up myself. My poor wrists.
(It was worth it.)
The clincher here comes in the form of sea salt sprinkled on top. I desperately wanted to find that really crunchy, flaky variety that you sometimes get in very nice restaurants, but I couldn’t. Woe. I’m a bit of a fiend when it comes to salt + sugar. I might murder you if you get between me and salted caramel ice cream, and when I read this recipe’s call for salt on the cookie I think I actually made them the very next day.
These came out perfect. Prior batches had been dicey, for which I blamed my old gas oven which is simply too hard to tame when baking something so delicate. So I moved future operations to my mom’s, and now warm these in her nice, new, state of the art cookie baking device. You’d think it would be an imposition, but for some reason she doesn’t seem to mind. Go figure.
There you have it, the story of the NYT cookie. The recipe is on their website, free for the taking. I have a feeling this thing kicks that silly Bloomingdale’s chocolate chip cookie recipe’s ass. Or is it Sacs 5th Ave.? Who cares, you should go make these.
TrackBack URI