Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe EVER ('cause it can be any kinda chip!)

Here it is, the best *INSERT YOUR CHIP FLAVOR HERE* cookie recipe. (SECRET RECIPE ALERT - I developed this through experimentation with the toll house cookie recipe on the backs of the nestle chips. This is seriously road tested.)

The preferred home favorite is White Chocolate Macadamia. Second runner up - plain White Chocolate. Third - Chocolate Chip.

All of them fab. Here is the secret why: you will increase the vanilla, add an extra 1/4 cup flour, and heap the teaspoon of salt just a smidge, instead of using the exact recipe on the back of toll house chip bags. I did a fair amount of test kitchen work to get these proportions. The additional vanilla and slightly heaping the teaspoon of salt is done to enhance the sweet flavor. Believe it or not, salt can do that - heighten the flavors of other items. And vanilla is notorious for accentuating the flavor of all chocolates. The additional 1/4 cup of flour gives more body but preserves softness, and prevents the evil flat cookie spread BUT doesn't yield hard and heavy like any more flour often does.

So: Here we go. Your waist line will hate me but your tummy will bless my name and erect monuments in my honor.

OVEN: 375 - preheat

INGREDIENTS

Dough:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt ( very slightly heaped, not flat cut - so mound it lightly in that tsp)
1 tsp baking soda (not powder, but soda - like Arm n Hammer)
3/4 cups white sugar
3/4 cups packed brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract (not imitation. don't cheap out here.)
1 cup (aka 2 sticks) butter UNSALTED!!!!! must be sweet cream or nothing!

Chips:
White chocolate macadamia - 1 12 oz bag Nestle premier white morsels, and about 3/4 cup cracked up macadamia nuts. Here's the skinny - yes, Giradellie has a finer taste, however they also have a lower melting point and caramelize and burn quicker so this brand is out if you want good cookies. For the nuts, I get them loose at the grocer, a little over a cup whole, put in a glad bag and hit with the meat mallet. Or rolling pin. Don't make dust of them, just smash to medium and small bits.

White Chocolate = 1  12 oz bag Nestle premier white morsels.

*NOTE: these are not so much white chocolate as white chips. Don't think to hard on it, trust me, your taste buds won't care about the details here.

Chocolate Chip - 1 12 oz bag Nestle semi-sweet chocolate morsels.

Additional materials
2 big reliable cookie sheets - aluminum is best. I always think the darker non stick are weird. There is a wide selection of cookie baking sheets and I like Quaker Oats Baking 101 for the explanations of the differences, though I am partial to air filled aluminum despite the questionable description.

2 mixing bowls, one big, and one not so big but big enough to hold all the flour.

Directions

Warning - I am an old school baker. My results are universally loved so the methods are not questioned. Whether you can cook or not, if you follow this, you will succeed and be deemed a Kitchen God/Goddess. So even if it sounds silly, do it.

PREP
You will need two bowls. Your big bowl is your wet and all ingredients bowl. The smaller is for your flower, salt, and baking powder.

Prior to baking, take out the butter and eggs, and let warm to almost room temp. A little before you are going to cook, dump butter sticks into your mix bowl for wet ingredients (yes, wet, we'll get to the rest), and cut up a bit with a knife. This is science in action - by increasing the surface area, you increase the speed it will soften.


Put flour in smaller bowl. Add salt and baking soda. Mix dry with a dry fork, until it looks blended. Set aside.

The butter should be nice and soft. If not, let it get there, and not with the use of a microwave. You can set it n ear the stove if you need a hurry up. Cream it smooth so it is well blended.

Add brown sugar and blend well into the butter. When that is evenly mixed, add the white sugar and mix again until well blended. Crack in the two eggs, hit two or three times to break yolk with your mixing spoon. Then before blending further, add the 2 tsp of vanilla extract. Now, blend it all together. Mix so that it's sloppy, wet, and brown. And well blended.

Add the dry to the wet. Mix. Slowly at first, almost like folding. It helps, I've found, to spin the bowl periodically while mixing. Like a sit and spin. Yes. Really. Not kidding here. It's an easy way to evenly mix. Pretty soon you will have cookie dough at which point everyone eats some. It's only human nature. Go ahead and grab some, but no more than a teaspoon.

Next, mix in your select additives. If you are doing chips n nuts, pour in chips, empty nuts and any nut dust on top of that, then blend.

When well mixed, you are ready to drop your cookies. Some folks use one of those little cookie dropper things that look like an ice cream scoop. That's cool. I don't own one. I use two teaspoons. Mound a teaspoon (not huge, a gentle mound) and use the other to scrape the batter into a drop onto your cookie sheet. Repeat until they are filled.

BAKING
7-9 minutes depending on your oven.
You want the edges to be faintly gold, and the tops to be high with another light dusting of gold.
On average, 8 seems to work, but occasionally I have to add an additional minute. Years ago I owned an oven that 7 on the dot was the exact magic time.

REMOVAL
Take the sheet out and set on stove top. For about 30 secs let the cookies sit. Then, using a metal spatula, or one that is VERY CRISP EDGED AND FLAT, remove cookies and place on a flat plate to cool. or a flat cold surface. It's important to take care as the cookies are very soft.

If the bottoms are unbrowned and white, put them back in for another minute.

Let cool, if you can manage, repeat baking process.

EATING
consume with insulin at the ready. ENJOY!!!!!

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