Jones Carey - Chocolate Chip Cookies: Dozens of Recipes for Reinterpreted Favorites

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Dozens of Recipes for Reinterpreted Favorites

by Carey Jones & Robyn Lenzi

Photographs by Antonis Achilleos

Text copyright 2013 by Carey Jones and Robyn Lenzi.

Photographs copyright 2013 by Antonis Achilleos.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2951-8

Designed by Vanessa Dina

Baking by Carey Jones and Robyn Lenzi

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Illustrations by Lydia Ortiz

Typesetting by Howie Severson

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Do you love chocolate chip cookies? Given that youre reading this book, were guessing you do. Youre not alone. While the chocolate chip cookie is the official dessert of both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania (who knew!?), it might as well be the signature cookie of every state: Americans eat an estimated seven billion chocolate chip cookies each year. And chocolate chip cookies make up half of all cookies baked in American households.

Chocolate chip cookies have long been a favorite go-to dessert and snack. As dessert trends come and go, chocolate chip cookies have always been a favorite, resistant to the passage of time and changing fashions and tastes. Chock-full of melty, gooey chocolate and brown-sugary buttery goodness, this cookie satisfies both chocolate lovers and cookie lovers, hitting that sweet spot (pun intended) right in the middle. It also provides a wonderful palette for experimentation: Add nuts, fruit, or other extras to a chocolate chip cookie, and it gets more interesting. Switch things up by using different flours, fats, and sweeteners, and the end result is still delicious. Chocolate chip cookies play nicely with other ingredients, too: Think a tall glass of cold milk for dunking, or a scoop of vanilla ice cream sandwiched by two chewy cookies. And on top of all that, chocolate chip cookies are portable and easy to make!

We know that many store-bought chocolate chip cookies can hit the spot, but nothing beats the appeal of a homemade chocolate chip cookie, fresh out of the oven. Thats where this book comes in. We want you to have more options than just the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag. Whether youre looking to add some novelty to your existing cookie repertoire, punch up your bake-sale offerings, or simply discover a new go-to chocolate chip recipe, youll find it here.

An important thing you should know about us is that we are avowed fans of chocolate chip cookies. And thats a good thing, because while working on this book, we each ate about five hundred cookies (all in the name of research, of course). Weve created what we believe to be forty-one of the tastiest chocolate chip cookies out there, and we want to share them with you.

First off, lets talk about what makes a chocolate chip cookie distinctive. Clearly, chocolate chips are the defining ingredient. But chocolate chip cookies also typically include a combination of brown sugar and white sugar, differentiating them from sugar cookies, which use only white sugar. The brown sugar adds caramelized notes and moisture. Both sugars are creamed together with butter, usually at room temperature, a process that helps the sugar dissolve more easily, for a smooth mouthfeel in the finished cookie. The butter also lends a rich taste and melts in the oven, allowing the cookie to spread. Eggs add richness and flavor to the dough and also act as a binding agent, holding the wet and dry ingredients together. Flour (usually all-purpose) provides the structure for the cookie. When wheat flour is mixed with other ingredients, gluten forms, giving the cookie its chewy texture. A leavener, typically baking soda, interacts with the moisture in the other ingredients and causes the dough to rise during baking. Baking soda also helps the cookie brown by reducing its acidity. Finally, a small amount of salt enhances the flavors in the cookie. While nuts, fruits, spices, and other additions are common in chocolate chip cookies, and we use them in many of our recipes, they arent essential for a satisfying basic chocolate chip cookie. Finally, chocolate chip cookies are traditionally made as drop cookies, meaning theyre portioned onto baking sheets, generally by the tablespoonful, and then the dough spreads out into round cookies during baking.

Weve divided this book into six chapters, with the unifying theme being that every recipe contains chocolate in some form, whether chips, chunks, or chopped chocolate. : Beyond Drop Cookies play with putting classic chocolate chip flavors into unexpected forms, such as cakes, bars, and even a cookie baked in a skillet.

Although the recipes in serve as inspiration for many of the other cookies in the book, they arent base doughs for other recipes. Rather than simply adding mix-ins to the cookies in the later chapters, we formulated each recipe to make sure the flavors came together in the best possible way, then tested and retested to get each one just right. We do, however, encourage you to experiment with the recipes in the first chapter, adding whatever mix-ins you like.

When developing the recipes in this book, we wanted to make sure that the average home baker could pull them off with no problem. However, we also had some ambitious ideas, and to make them work a few of the recipes require slightly more complicated techniques. Where a recipe is a little trickier, or just takes a few more steps, weve noted it in the recipe.

One more note about the cookies in this book: In our experience, people tend to fall into one of three camps when it comes to cookie texturecrispy, soft, or chewy. Most of our recipes fall into one of those three categories, although a few do have different, unique textures. When relevant, weve noted whether the cookie is crispy, soft, or chewy to give you another benchmark when choosing what to bake.

Before we dive into the recipes, we want to address a few things so you can bake like a pro from the get-go. In addition to offering pointers on ingredients, well discuss measuring, mixing, resting dough, portioning cookies, freezing dough, baking, yields, and storage.

We believe that a cookie is only as good as the sum of its parts. And because a chocolate chip cookie has so few necessary partsflour, sugar, butter, eggs, chocolate, salt, and leavenerwe use the best-quality ingredients we can afford. Well tell you what we prefer, but feel free to experiment and find the ingredients you love.

We arent picky about leavenersbaking soda and baking powder. Any brand will do. However, its important that you use leaveners that are fairly fresh. Over time, they lose their potency and wont provide adequate leavening, resulting in flat cookies.