Chocolate Chip Cookies

Now that I’ve got a hang of making cinnamon roll to consistency, I’m moving on to chocolate chip cookies. I want to work towards making a cookie that’s craggy and chewy. The Food Lab recipe wasn’t quite what I wanted so I didn’t record a recipe. I think it’s going to take more than small changes and tweaks to the recipe, for what I’m going for.

Food Lab Recipe

I recently attempted to make Food Lab recipe and was moderately successful. This recipe requires brown butter and is pretty high in fat. It also has an overnight rest.

Brown Butter

Browning butter is pretty simple: heat butter in a pan until it stops boiling off water. Try to do this with a medium-low heat, to minimize the splatter.

After all the moisture is removed, the temperature will quickly rise and the Maillard reaction will quickly talk hold.

Browning butter removes moisture, so it should be treated similar to oil (pure fat).

A mistake I made was to not cool the butter completely. It doesn’t cream with sugar very well. The dough becomes very slack and greasy.

Doneness

Since the recipe uses brown butter and brown sugar, the resulting dough is darker than usual. It’s hard to tell when the cookies are done, based only on colour.

You need to remove the cookie while it’s still soft and the edges appear to have set. They’ll very soft and will firm up as they cool. Give the cookies 5 minutes to cool on the tray before moving to a cooling rack.

BraveTart

Next time, I’m going to give the BraveTart recipe a try.

It uses less fat, more sugar, far less eggs, more leavening. I think this will contribute to a less fudgey and soft, due to less fats and eggs. It’ll be chewier due to more flour.

And the increase in leavening will help to keep the dough from being to dense. In fact, it probably causes the cookie to rise while baking and immediately deflate as soon as removed from the oven. This will result in structural collapse and a craggy texture.

This all sounds closer to kind of cookie I want.