Hi and a huge welcome to Steve's kitchen Today we're going on a journey of
discovery on chocolate chip cookies. I'm going to be teaching you how to make my
perfect chocolate chip cookie. Now this is it I've got a lovely stack them here
they might not be your perfect chocolate chip cookie and I'll explain why
I like them. If you have a chocolate chip cookie you bite round the outside it's
got lots of chocolate chips, when you get to the center you've got a beautiful
chocolate filling in the middle, that's my perfect chocolate chip cookie. So you
read the title right, today we're going to make your perfect chocolate chip
cookie, come on let's go. I'm able to call this the best chocolate chip cookie
recipe ever because it is in my opinion. Now some people might like a soft or
chewy cookie, some people might like a firm cookie and I'm going to explain to
you how we can take this cookie recipe and make it the way you like it so each
stage we'll be discussing why it is we're doing what we're doing and what you can
do to make a different result. Add 120 grams 4 ounces of salted butter, now
we're using salted butter because we want our cookies to taste good. I have
200 grams that's 7 ounces of dark brown soft sugar, we're using dark brown soft sugar
because it has a molasses content in it which adds flavor, you can use plain
white sugar it doesn't matter this is all about increasing the flavor of our
cookies. Because our butter is nice and soft we can cream it together with the
sugar and get a lovely light batter. Eggs and vanilla go well together, we use the
vanilla to mask the flavor a little bit of the eggs, we need the egg in the
cookie to help bind the cookie together. Now we want to beat the eggs into the
batter and don't worry a little bit if it splits at this moment. For my perfect
cookies I'm adding in 230 grams that's about 8 ounces of all-purpose flour. Now
here is where things can change up a little if you want something a little
bit different in flavor for example a chocolate hobnob has got some extra
bran flour and oatmeal flour in there, so it can change the taste. You can use
all sorts of different flours but an all-purpose flour makes a really good
chocolate chip cookie whichever flour you choose we're going
to want a teaspoon of baking powder in there and a little
bit of salt, half a teaspoon for seasoning. You want to combine the flour
in with the rest of the ingredients now to get a lovely smooth cookie dough. So
now we've got this perfect cookie batter, it's a little bit soft at this point you
might want to put your chocolate chips in, don't do that yet, wait until I come
back, we're just going to chill this in the fridge for 20 minutes to an hour
until it's firmed up. After 30 minutes of chilling we've got a dough that's much
firmer and something we can handle. Now you may well ask why didn't we put
the chocolate chips in while the dough was soft as so many recipe suggests, well
I'm going to explain to you. When you go into a supermarket and see a muffin on
the side there and it says that it's white chocolate and raspberry and you
can see the sea of white chocolate and raspberries bursting off the top, so you
buy it, you take it out of the supermarket and you take one bite into
it, under that sea you find just a lot of sponge, there's no raspberries there's no
white chocolate in there all the way down to the bottom.
Supermarkets know that we buy with our eyes and so I want this chocolate chip
cookie to be fantastic to look at as well as taste. So what I'm going to do is
put the chocolate chips on the outside but I'm not going to forget the inside as
well. I'm making up 80 grams that's about 3 ounces of cookie into a small ball and
what we're going to do is inside that cookie I'm going to take some chocolate
melts and we're going to fill the center not one chocolate melt but two put
together so it's a little sphere. So you're going to have a beautiful lava of
chocolate in the center of the cookies. We're then going to take that cookie and
we're going to dip it into our chocolate chips to get a little lovely coating, the
trick is when you're making chocolate chip cookies normally and you mix it in
the dough just one or two of those chocolate chips Bob to the top like a
boy on the ocean and shout out so everybody wants that chocolate chip, by
doing it this way you get a complete sea of chocolate chips on top of the cookie
and we haven't got that awful supermarket muffin experience where
there's no chocolate inside the cookie and that is why these are my perfect
chocolate chip cookies. If you bake them a little bit longer you'll end up with
these sugars caramelizing more and you'll get a crisper cookie, if you go
for less you will get a softer cookie, if you like a cookie now I'm trying to
think of an example maybe a peanut butter cookie or brand maybe the fox's
Chocolate Chunk cookies cookies that sit high, they're more sort of a firmer like
cookie, increase your flour content by about 10 to 20 percent maximum and you
will have a cookie that sits high on the plate. I like my cookies to settle down
into a sort of dome shape but if you want that high rise maybe you could
comment down below and let me know some examples of some brands that sit
high like that. Now if you reduce the flour content down by again only a small
amount maybe 10 to 20 percent you will get a cookie that goes very flat and
melts onto the tray almost like a gingersnap so they get quite thin and
crispy and if you cook those longer again they will crisp up. You often see
people making cookies when they end up with a mistake where the cookie ends up
like almost a puddle on the baking sheet because they didn't put enough flour in
nine times out of ten that's because they followed the recipe but they
haven't used scales, they've gone for cups and they've got the ingredient
measurements wrong. So now you know what to do if you want to tweak your cookies
to make them perfect for you, you may at this point be following along exactly,
you might have tinkered with the flours, increasing/decreasing, maybe change the
flours up a little bit, you're going to end up with about ten cookies. I've got
eight on a tray here I put two onto another tray. I'm using that tray as a
sort of test model to show you if you under bake them by a couple of minutes
or over bake them by a few minutes just how different the cookies will be to the
way I think they're perfect. We're now going to bake these for about 13 to 14
minutes I'll just keep an eye on them, Then I'm going to take them out the oven
and cool down and we'll have a look at the final results when my cookies have
baked and they cooled down and I just wanted to show you here on this board
I've got three different cookies baked at different times. We've got 11 minutes
13 minutes and 16 minutes, so super soft, medium soft and crispy, that's basically
the difference you get from cooking the cookies for longer or shorter. This is my
perfect cookie, I've got a big stack of them down there, you might like to
experiment and come up with the perfect cookie for you. Whether you do what I
said about with the flours, experimenting with
different sugars, at the end of the day you might find that this cookie that I
baked here, the 13 minute perfect Steve's kitchen cookie, you might find you like
it. I certainly do but I would love it if
you'd share your experiences with me down in the comments or on social media,
post across some pictures. Don't these cookies look absolutely fantastic by the
way and I am going to tuck in and give one of these a try, the beauty of this
cookie is its chocolate chips all the way and when you get to the center
there's going to be that lovely big dose of chocolate in the middle. I'm going to
give this a go mmm well that is absolutely perfectly delicious, it's just
a little bit soft, a little bit chewy, I don't know whether I might even like
that 11 minute one there, I'm not so keen on the crispy ones. Let me know what you
think. I hope you've appreciated me baking here
today, it's super hot in Australia over 100 degrees Fahrenheit 40 plus degrees
Celsius and I'm really not looking forward to having these with a cup of
coffee today, I think I need a cold drink. Anyway share the love, give this the
thumbs up and I will see you for a fun recipe on Steve's kitchen very shortly, Be Good.