Who doesn't love cookies?
This is a recipe that's going to be very straightforward.
You're going to wow everybody who has these cookies.
You are going to learn all of the tricks of making the best
cookie of your life.
Let's get started.
Let's start with the really basic, which is mise en place.
What that means is gathering everything in its place
before you start the recipe.
So I start with the chocolate.
With a chef's knife, I'm just going
to take this chunk of chocolate and cut down like this.
So I'm going to make sure all of the chocolate is about half
an inch to an inch in size.
For me, a chocolate chunk is what
I want when I'm eating a chocolate chip cookie.
Place your bowl on the scale, and then you press tare.
And that zeros it out so that it doesn't take into account
the weight of the bowl.
I'm going to start measuring till I get about 255.
So I have 255 grams of chocolate.
Can you imagine if I tried to figure out
how many cups this is?
Like if you chop your chocolate really small
and then if I chop it kind of big,
we're going to end up with two totally different amounts.
I weigh everything.
I'm going to tare again.
So that zeros it out.
Now I can add milk chocolate.
I'm just going to start shaving it down.
This one's a little bit easier to cut because it's softer.
I need about 70 grams, so I've tared the scale.
72, almost perfect.
So now we have our 255 grams of dark chocolate
and about 70 grams of milk chocolate.
Now I've got my second bowl.
150 grams of granulated sugar.
This is three quarters of a cup.
I'm just going to measure this out, and we've got our 150.
And then in the same bowl, I'm going
to measure the Brown sugar.
Tare that.
Now brown sugar is a great example
of why we want to use a scale rather than a measuring cup.
It looks like it's taking up this much room in the bowl.
But you can pack it down.
So that means that if you're measuring brown sugar using
a cup measurement, if I'm measuring brown sugar using
a cup measurement, we might end up
with two totally different measurements
depending on who packs down the brown sugar more.
So that's why we measure with the scale.
In the same bowl, 165 grams of brown sugar.
The next thing we're going to measure out
is our dry ingredients.
I'm going to start out with a nice big bowl,
and remember to tare so that you start back at 0.
High gluten bread flour, 160 grams.
By measuring everything out with a scale,
it also just makes things so much easier.
You don't have to have multiple cup measures.
You can just go ahead and dump everything
straight into the dry mix.
I actually like a cookie that has
a little bit of like thickness and a little bit of chew.
So we've added the high gluten flour,
going to tare that again.
Now we have your basic all purpose flour, 150 grams.
So now we've got the flour measured.
We're going to add a teaspoon of baking soda.
Now with stuff like baking soda, we're
using these items, these ingredients
in such small measures that the scale doesn't really register.
I go with the teaspoon measure.
So we've got a teaspoon of baking soda.
We have a half a teaspoon of kosher salt.
So I have two large eggs.
And these are at room temperature.
And you're going to crack them directly into a small bowl.
Then we're going to add a teaspoon of vanilla extract.
I don't want little pockets of egg yolk to be in the mix.
So I'm going to whisk it all together
to try to create something that's
a little bit homogeneous.
The eggs are at room temperature because when
we are going to mix the cookie dough together,
we're going to spend a lot of time
creaming that butter and sugar together.
The butter is going to start to soften.
It's going to get aerated with all of the sugar.
If the eggs are cold, as soon as the eggs hit the butter
and sugar, it's going to cause the butter to firm up.
We're going to cream the heck out of it, make it really light
and fluffy.
Let's put together this dough.
We're going to start with unsalted butter.
The ideal temperature when creaming butter and sugar
when you have a stick like this is that you can bend it.
First, mixing up the butter and then adding the sugar.
If you buy salted butter in the grocery store,
there are different brands.
And you really don't know how much salt
has been added to the butter.
Creaming butter and sugar, that is not a step
that you want to skip.
It adds such a huge difference to the texture of the cookie
so that you get that really nice light chewy texture.
If it gets to the point where the butter is so warm that it
starts to melt, all of those air pockets start to collapse.
After you've put the butter in the mixing bowl
is to then add the sugar.
We've got both the mix of the brown sugar
and the white sugar.
We're going to go ahead and get started.
Let's start this at a slow speed.
It should take about 3 to 5, maybe 8 minutes
to get this beautiful fluffy butter and sugar mixture.
Basically, the term creaming butter and sugar together
is when you mix butter and sugar together and keep
mixing it, and mixing it, and mixing it
until it lightens in color.
In fact, it turns to almost the color
of like heavy cream, which is how it gets its name, creaming
butter and sugar together.
Now why is that so important?
If you were to have a microscope here and take
either the brown sugar or the white sugar
and look at it under a microscope,
you know that sugar is a crystal.
Now these hard crystals when they
go into your softened butter are basically aerating your butter.
I'm going to take a spatula and really get into the bowl.
A lot of times, the butter will collect.
Make sure that it gets loosened so that it can all get creamed
together with your sugar.
Imagine all of those sugar crystals creating
all of the air in the butter, and just
let your mind relax a little bit.
Just in case there's any last bits
that I didn't get the first time,
I usually do this about twice.
Now these eggs are again at room temperature.
So I'm going to turn the mixer on kind of a low speed.
Slowly drizzle it in so that it has time to fully mix in
to the butter and sugar.
Great.
Now the egg, and the butter, and the sugar are all mixed in.
So it's not going to be quite as fluffy because we've
added a little bit of egg.
But it should be kind of creamy looking.
And you don't want pieces of egg mixed in with pieces of butter.
You really want it to be kind of homogeneous
because if it's separated, then when the dry ingredients hit
it, then the dry ingredients are going to latch on to the egg,
and they're going to latch on to the butter,
and you're going to end up with weird little pockets.
Let me give it another scrape.
Make sure we get all of that.
And this is looking really beautiful.
Now I did want to show you-- you can
see like when I cracked the egg, there
was a little bit of egg shell.
So this is why we crack into the bowl
and then pour the eggs because if this ends up
in somebody's cookie-- have you ever
had a cookie with egg shell?
It's like-- you'd think it wouldn't be so bad.
You think it'd be nice and crunchy, but it's pretty nasty.
Great.
Let's now mix our chocolate in with the flour.
So the reason I mix the chocolate into the flour
is that that way I can combine the flour into the egg, sugar,
and butter mixture with minimal gluten development
because, remember, the gluten will
start developing as soon as the flour hits anything liquid.
I like to mix this part with the mixer.
And then I like to finish it by hand because I
don't want to over mix.
If I were to turn this on, all the flour would go everywhere.
So I'm just going to pulse on/off, on/off.
So I've mixed it pretty much all the way.
But I'm actually going to finish mixing it by hand.
I like to finally feel the dough.
I've let the machine do everything.
And now I want to do something.
So let's go ahead and take this out.
And then also it allows me to control how much mixing we're
doing so that we don't overwork the dough.
Butter and sugar both inhibit gluten development.
So I'm not too worried about getting a cookie dough that's
going to be tough.
But as I'm mixing, I make sure it's all been mixed in,
and now it's ready to go.
Now this chocolate chip cookie dough,
you don't want to bake it right now.
These will be a thousand times better
if you let the dough rest overnight in the fridge.
That flour is going to absorb more of the liquid that's
in the eggs and in the butter.
And it's going to bake off into a much better cookie.
So take your dough, and scrape it into an airtight container.
Take the time to rest the dough.
What that does is it hydrates the flour
so that you end up with a really beautiful, thick chocolate chip
cookie.
And now we're going to scoop and bake these cookies.
We're going to go ahead and put about six cookies per trade.
I like to place them 2 to 3 inches apart.
They're going to spread a little bit.
So you do want to give them a little bit of room.
Ideally, you're going to want to bake one cookie tray at a time
because, that way, you'll have even airflow
above and below the cookie sheet.
Your cookies will bake off nice and evenly.
But let's be real.
You've got two cookie sheets.
Are you really going to want to wait?
So I won't be upset if you bake two at a time.
Just know that if you really want
to do this perfectly right, you should bake one at a time.
Now that I've got my cookie scooped,
we're going to go ahead and go to the oven
and start baking our cookies.
Make sure you have an oven thermometer
so that you know that the oven is actually at 350.
So let's go ahead and go to the oven.
At the end of the day, you are in your kitchen,
looking at your product, working with your oven.
And so I really want you to learn how
to bake by sight and by touch.
Even though you might have an oven thermometer that says 350,
my oven thermometer says 350, there's
so much variation in ovens.
The oven isn't just staying at a static 350.
What happens is the oven is triggered.
Once it goes below a certain point, the heat kicks in again.
And then it brings it up a certain point.
And so ovens kind of waver between 10 degrees, 5 degrees.
It depends on your oven.
So I just pulled these amazing chocolate chip cookies
out of the oven, and I'm going to let them rest here
for about 10 minutes before I take them off
and put them on the cooling tray.
I think we should try some of the warm cookies.
Oh my gosh.
Is your cookie like this?
There's like gooey milk chocolate
and gooey dark chocolate inside.
And so let's go ahead and--
mm.
What am I looking for?
You can see visually your cookies are golden brown.
It's pale in the center.
But they're totally cooked through in the center.
If you pull them out too early, you're
going to end up with this little pocket of raw dough.
It won't be the end of the world.
But, ideally, you want the cookie
to be baked all the way through.
For me, the perfect chocolate chip cookie
is kind of balanced with a lot of chocolate flavor.
It's got a crispy edge.
It's got a tender melt in your mouth center.
It's got big pieces of chocolate all throughout.
There's also a little hint of molasses.
It's from the brown sugar and a little caramel
from the milk chocolate.
And then there's just a little bit of salt.
We put in that kosher salt into the recipe.
And you can actually taste a little hint of salt.
It's not salty by any means.
But it's enough salt to really draw out
the flavors of the butter, the vanilla, and all
of the chocolate.
They are definitely best eaten day of that you bake them.
But if you store them, they should
last about two more days in an airtight container.
So now you've become a star cookie baker.
If you really want to improve your cookie baking,
there's one simple trick.
Just keep making cookies.
And who's going to complain about that?
Making cookies over and over again,
you will get so much practice, and you
will learn how every single little adjustment you make
changes the result of the cookie.
And you'll be able to fine-tune your own technique so
that you can be the best cookie baker ever.
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