Cook's Illustrated's PERFECT Chocolate Chip Cookies

For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know how fond I am of all things America’s Test Kitchen. So imagine how excited I was to learn about their new Cook's Illustrated Boston Blogger Cookie Challenge.

Yup, you guessed right – seriously excited!! The challenge was pretty straightforward. Bake a batch of their Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies, take some pictures, and blog about it. I could not wait to get started…

Yesterday was the day. I went to the market to pick up the ingredients (fresh is best!), charged the batteries in my new fancy camera, and got to work.

The first step, as always, is mise en place – getting all my ingredients measured, prepped and ready to go. I’m still surprised at just how much easier the entire cooking process is when I do this. No rushing to chop or measure something before it’s too late, no realizing you don’t have enough of some ingredient, and it even makes cleaning up easier. Not to mention, 9 out of 10 times, the food comes out better in the end.

Okay, mise en place done and now I’m ready to go. Just look how organized everything is!

The first step is easy – whisk the baking soda into the flour and set aside. Check. Even I can’t screw that one up.

Then come the steps that were a little new to me. I’ll confess, when I make chocolate chip cookies, I buy a bag of Nestle chocolate chips and follow the recipe on the bag. Other than throwing in some toffee chips and maybe some peanut butter chips to give it a little something extra, I normally stick to the tried and true. Why deviate from what you know works, right? (Blogging challenge, that’s why!)

First up is to melt the butter. What? Softened butter sure, but melted? That seems odd. But like I’ve said before, these guys know what they’re doing. Just go with it.

The Test Kitchen recommends not using a non-stick skillet for melting the butter because it’s difficult to gauge the brownness of the melted butter. Unfortunately, my non-stick skillet is brand new and my stainless steel skillet wasn’t quite camera ready after a bad experience with a veggie burger over the weekend. But I digress...

I watched the butter closely, taking the non-stick skillet warning very seriously, because I did not want it to over brown. If anything, it was probably slightly under-browned, but I think that’s better than the alternative.

I melted most of the butter in the skillet, then melted the remaining butter in the melted butter in a heat safe mixing bowl. (I will confess, I was not quite confident that my mixing bowl was heat safe, so I did clear the area in case an explosion occurred. Despite my history of kitchen accidents, this experiment turned out okay.)

When the butter was fully melted, I added the sugars, salt and vanilla to the bowl, then the eggs.  (Side note, I used my homemade vanilla. Vodka and vanilla bean - leave a comment if you want the exact recipe. This vanilla will stand up to anything you can buy in the store any day. I swear it.)

This stage of the recipe called for an interesting technique of whisking and resting, whisking and resting, and whisking and resting once more. Each whisk period was 30 seconds long, and then we would rest for 3 minutes. I used my oven timer to ensure I didn’t rush the rest period. At first, I found this a little bit annoying, but then I found the break really helpful as it gave me the opportunity to clean as I go without delaying the baking process.

Here are some pictures so you can see how the batter changes after each stage of whisking and resting. Also, my right arm could kick my left arm’s butt in a fight after the workout it got from all the whisking.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to taste at this point. Butter and brown sugar is kind of like heaven on earth – rich, buttery toffee flavors that are out of this world. Yum! I was starting to see (or taste) the genius of this recipe.

Now it’s time for the flour, then the chocolate chips. I opted to use chocolate chunks since I wanted to go for a bigger, gooier chocolate flavor.

The dough definitely looked and felt a lot more wet than your average cookie dough, but it made sense what with all the melted butter and all.

And it tasted pretty darn good.

Okay, it’s time to get that dough on the cookie sheets. Three tablespoons per cookie, and all I have is a two tablespoon ice cream scoop. I decided to use that ice cream scoop because even though it wasn’t the right size, it was still better than a spoon. I aimed for a 1 1/2 scoop fill, and it worked. I scooped out exactly 16 cookies – just what the recipe intended.

Time to bake. This is where I usually screw up. The recipe suggests 10-14 minutes per batch, turning halfway through. When I was a kid, I was told that you always bake cookies for less time than the recipe suggests. But in my older days, I have found recipe times to be far more accurate. So I split the difference and cooked the first batch for 12 minutes.

Halfway through...                    All the way through

You know, 12 minutes was slightly too long – at least it was in my oven. The cookies were still fine, just a tad darker than “golden,” if you know what I mean. I cooked the second batch for 10 minutes, and these came out perfect.

After a couple of minutes, I transferred the cookies to a wire rack to cool. This may sound like an odd choice, but I use a fish spatula for transferring still-warm cookies. It’s nice and thin, as opposed to all of my plastic and silicone spatulas which are pretty clunky and can do more harm than good. With the parchment paper on my baking sheets, there were no worries about scratching and the cookies transferred without issue.

Naturally, I couldn’t wait to try one. After I burned my mouth on some oozing melted chocolate, I decided to wait a few more minutes and try again.

Ah, this time I could actually taste the cookie. I think the “perfect” in the recipe title is an apt description. But let’s be fair. Here I am, awfully proud of myself. I may not be the best judge of my efforts.

Since there was no way I could fairly assess the outcome of these cookies, I had to wait for my favorite taster to come home. My poor husband barely got a chance to put his bag down before I was twisting his arm to try a cookie. He wanted to wait until after dinner, and there was no convincing him to eat cookie first, chicken later. (Um, hi, we’re grown ups – we can eat dessert whenever we want!)

But it was worth the wait. My husband’s verdict was music to my ears: crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, big chocolate flavor. Yea me!! Well, really “yea Cook's Illustrated,” but I at least executed the recipe correctly so I do deserve a little credit.

At the risk of being accused of brown nosing the judges of this blogging challenge, I can honestly say it is the PERFECT chocolate chip cookie recipe.

To try the recipe for yourself – and I highly recommend that you do – visit this link to the recipe on the Cook’s Illustrated website. Try it once and it will be your go to cookie recipe. I promise.

You can also learn more about Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen by clicking here, and visiting their website.