A new style of making cookie dough has been born in this house,
hence the birthday plate. Now, I have made my fair share of chocolate chip cookies. I've made 'em plain, with walnuts, with pecans, with raisins, with nuts and raisins, with nuts, raisins, coconut and oatmeal, with all butter, with half butter half shortening, with applesauce (in an attempt to replace sugar - yuck), with milk chocolate, with bittersweet chocolate, with a combo of chocolates, with cocoa in the batter, with ...well, you name it. I have never made 'em, however, with melted butter. Melting the butter will evaporate the water in it, which in turn lends to a r-e-a-l-l-y nice chewy cookie. Browning the butter, no less, imparts a delicious nutty, toffey-like flavor that can't be beat, either.
Today, while hanging around the house in my pajamas all day watching t.v. here and there, I caught a cooking show (America's Test Kitchen--one of my favorites) in which this "newly discovered" method for the quintessential chocolate chip cookie was unveiled. Naturally this meant I had to make them. So I did.
ATK's style is perfectly homey for me, although I do wish they would ease up big-time on the gross waste of plastic and foil, and so forth, that they inadvertantly encourage while advocating "ease of clean-up." And, God knows how much food gets wasted as they fumble about trying to perfect any given recipe. But, they do have some great tips to offer, and they do utilize really good, classic cooking techniques, so I watch them. Someday soon I will write to them and ask them to reconsider their on-screen habits. Until then, check out this recipe.
Here's the batter once the 1/2c sugar, 3/4c brown sugar, 1 egg and 1 egg yolk, and 2 tsp vanilla extract was added to the 14 Tbsp of unsltd browned butter. Talk about delicious. If you've ever wanted to know what liquid toffee tastes like, make these.
Next I added in their recommended 8-3/4 ounces of flour that had been whisked with 1/2 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp salt. Things seemed a bit stiff at first--much stiffer than most typical cookie recipes--but it all came together as expected. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought it was peanut butter cookie dough.
Next, 3/4c of chopped toasted walnuts went in, followed by a good 8oz of chopped/partially shaved Dagoba chocolate (59% cocoa) (ATK used 1 pkg of Ghiradelli bittersweet chips)...
We like BIG cookies, so...
Into the oven (375 degrees) for 12-14 minutes, and rotated half way through. It killed me to do only one pan at a time (ATK highly recommends one pan at a time), but I did, as I only had two pans-worth of cookies to bake (like I said, we like BIG cookies)...
Gotta say, this was quite the delicious recipe. Browned butter...whoda thunk?
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