Do you worry you might be getting a little…odd in COVID lockdown? Like all of us, I’ve had to learn to fill my time when most everything we do is confined within the boundaries of our home. I haven’t been writing much fiction in quarantine—a combination of being in a strange headspace and spending a LOT of time and energy on editing, both my job as a book editor (which I “outed” myself on last week) and edits for my next Berkley title, The Way We Weren’t, due out in November. (I hope to have a cover to share with you any day now.) But my creative side has been itching to be fulfilled, and I’ve rediscovered baking, a forgotten love of my younger years. This seems harmless at first glance, weight gain aside, right? But stick with me. It’s about to get weird. I’m not especially adept at baking. I’m more of what we’d call an eater of sweets than an artiste of the form. While I have become an aficionado of The Great British Baking Show and I salivate over the fancy desserts and pastries they craft, I don’t attempt them. I know my limitations. I’ve been specializing in only one thing: cookies. One cookie, to be precise: chocolate-chip. Don’t ask me why, but I’ve become a little obsessive about mastering the perfect chocolate-chip cookie. It started with one of my best friends, who told me that in lockdown his husband has been rampantly cooking and had developed an incredibly good version of what he called an “adult” chocolate-chip cookie—a bit less sweet, with more complex flavors. Now, I’m not a rabid chocolate-chip cookie fan. Really I’m sort of cookie-neutral in general—I’ve always been a cake lover more than anything. But something about this piqued my interest and I asked for the recipe. Friends, this cookie was transformative. Rich with molasses and dark chocolate, chewy in the center and crispy at the edges, it was a little explosion of sophisticated sweetness in my mouth. I made not just one batch, not just a couple, but endless batches, craving them constantly, sharing the surplus with friends, who reacted similarly. It looked like this around here for a while: |
My friend’s husband—Mike—wasn’t messing around with his recipe. It had thoughtful, specific notes like, “I use Trader Joe’s semi-sweet chocolate chunks. I think the size and flavor profile are the best” and “I also use Trader Joe’s dark brown sugar. It’s very, very molasses-y. It gives the cookie a more earthy balance” and “Play with how long you bake the cookie. You’ll figure out for yourself what level of chewy or crispy you want.”
This wasn’t just ingredients thrown together and baked for a sugar fix—this was serious business and Mike had put some thought into it.
It was a revelation to me that a recipe could be approached in such a way—I have always been an unimaginative baker, content to follow a simple recipe. But I became fascinated by the effort he put into his, by the fact that different ingredients, amounts, techniques could change the whole experience of the cookie.
I began to experiment.
I was fairly simple at first—left out the pecans, added butterscotch or peanut-butter chips, sprinkled Maldon flake salt on top. These little change-ups were well received.
But in reading about why my cookies might be flatter than Mike’s, I became obsessed with the science of baking. I experimented with tweaking the amount of flour to compensate for how Texas’s higher humidity might impact the rise (a thing!).
I read up on leaveners like baking soda and baking powder and how they reacted with different doughs. I converted all the standard cup measurements into weight, and started carefully weighing each ingredient to the gram (including the egg, folks—when I read that modern eggs are substantially larger than eggs in days of yore).
Then one day, making a double batch, I messed up and left the white sugar out. I apologetically served them to friends awaiting cookie delivery—and they went nuts over them.
Here is when I really went down the rabbit hole. Though I too loved the flavor of the less-sweet cookies, I wondered at their changed texture: they were flatter and browner than I liked:
Science told me that sugar is considered a wet ingredient in certain recipes (what-what?), for reasons that defy my understanding but that you can read about here. It also helps hold on to moisture in the recipe, tenderizes, and serves to create structure. It even helps leaven! (More on this here if you’re not yet glazed over, forgive the pun.)
Am I losing you yet? Because at this point I was just getting started.
I wanted a slightly less-sweet cookie, with the structure, richness, and chewiness of Mike’s cookie. And so then batch-cooking began.
My internet reading taught me about a thing called baker’s percentages—not to overwhelm you with the math, because it hurts my head, quite frankly, and I had to get my husband to compute the percentages I needed, which looked like this:
In a baker’s percentage you figure 100 percent based on the amount of flour, and every other ingredient as a percentage of that amount.
So I learned Mike’s recipe had something like 113% total sugar in the recipe, and I wondered how to reduce that without changing the texture. Enter King Arthur Flour, who had a detailed blog on this exact thing for numerous types of cookies, including my new holy grail, chocolate-chip.
Long story short, then this happened.
Meanwhile I’d also been reading about a very famous chocolate-chip cookie created by chef Jacques Torres and hailed across the food-blog universe (which is expansive and constantly expanding just like the regular universe, I learned) as the gold standard. Naturally I had to try that too—right here:
Verdict: Good, but not as good as Mike’s.
I also started reading up on chocolate chips—texture, size, cacao content—and that resulted in this:
(Clear winner, BTW—as Mike said to begin with, Trader Joe’s Semisweet Chocolate Chunks, whose irregular texture and size and much higher cacao content yields a fantastic, melty, deeply chocolate puddle of goodness inside the cookie…though I realized from the Jacques Torres recipe that more chocolate = better cookie, and I now double Mike’s called-for amount.) Readers…at this point I even followed Alton Brown’s recipe for making my own brown sugar—which works like a dream, BTW—incredibly quick and easy and yields the tastiest, most complexly flavored brown sugar you’ve ever had, and is the only brown sugar I will use from now on:
In my quest I then decided to start messing around with several of the ingredients.
The cookie on the left, below, was made subbing half cake flour and half bread flour for Mike’s all-purpose, and using half of both sugars called for, white and brown. The center cookie used unsalted butter, all-purpose flour, and half both sugars (and I subbed white chocolate chips for chocolate). They both came out higher and tender, but with a cakey texture I didn’t love.
The cookie on the right is Mike’s original, unbastardized recipe–much chewier, with crispy edges, and that amazing depth of flavor.
If you’re still reading you’ve gone on this long journey with me, and we’re winding up exactly where started. After all my experimentation, I and my taste testers have determined that the far superior cookie is Mike’s original recipe.
Was this a wasted few months of effort? Does it indeed seem to border on obsessive? Or can I be proud of my spirit of experimentation, and for growing creatively and intellectually in quarantine as a result?
Who can say. But if you’re intrigued to taste the cookie that started it all, the recipe is below.
I hope you’re all finding fulfilling pursuits in your own quarantines, friends–pointless or not–and that, with vaccinations around the corner for everyone who wants one, soon we’ll all be back in the world and together again!
Mike McGowan’s Adult Chocolate-chip Cookies
Ingredients:
12 Tbsp salted butter (room temperature) (170.1 g or 6 oz)
1 cup packed dark brown sugar (213g or 7.5 oz)
1/2 cup granulated sugar (100g or 8 oz)
1 large egg (~50g or 2.125oz)
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (210g or 8 oz)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp molasses
~6 oz semisweet chocolate chips
~6 oz pecan pieces
Instructions:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
- In a large bowl cream the butter and sugars until fluffy (3-4 minutes). Then mix in egg, vanilla and molasses.
- Add the dry ingredients a little at a time into the wet ingredients. Scrape the sides often to make sure no dry ingredients are missed. Once the flour mixture is fully incorporated, add the chips and pecans.
- Line a cookie tray with parchment and spoon cookie dough onto the parchment. I do about 2 tbsp per cookie. Bake for 7-8 minutes, then turn tray 180 degrees and bake for 7-8 more minutes. You’ll figure out how long you need to cook depending on how crispy you like your cookie.
- Remove tray from the oven. Put the tray on a cooling rack for 5 minutes. Then take cookies off the tray and cool directly on the cooling rack.
Notes:
1. I use Trader Joe’s semi-sweet chocolate chunks. I think the size and flavor profile are the best.
2. I also use Trader Joe’s dark brown sugar. It’s very, very molasses-y. It gives the cookie a more earthy balance.
3. Play with how long you bake the cookie. You’ll figure out for yourself what level of chewy or crispy you want.
2 Comments. Leave new
I’ll never tire of trying another chocolate chip cookie recipe. This looks similar to the Cook’s Illustrated version. I’ve heard adding one egg plus one yolk enriches the dough…. craving!
Ooh, that sounds very good. I see another experiment in my cookie-making future! 😀 I’d love to know what you think of this recipe if you try it. I can’t get enough–and as I said, I’m usually pretty cookie-neutral.