Chocolate Chip Cookies

Photo by Mshuang2, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Description

A thick chocolate chip cookie with crisp edges, a soft middle, and pools of chocolate rather than uniform chips. Browning the butter first is the one step that separates this from every other cookie recipe, and it costs about five minutes.

The dough needs to rest in the fridge before baking. This is not optional fussiness: chilled dough spreads less, and the flour has time to hydrate, which is where the caramel flavour comes from. Overnight is better than an hour.

Ingredients

• 225 g unsalted butter
• 200 g soft light brown sugar
• 100 g caster sugar
• 2 large eggs, plus 1 egg yolk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 340 g plain flour
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1 teaspoon fine salt
• 300 g dark chocolate, roughly chopped into chunks and shards
• Flaky sea salt, for finishing

Steps

1. Melt the butter in a light-coloured saucepan over medium heat. Keep cooking and swirling it past the foaming stage until it smells nutty and brown flecks appear on the bottom, about 5 to 7 minutes. Pour it into a large bowl and let it cool for 10 minutes.
2. Whisk both sugars into the warm butter until smooth, then whisk in the eggs, the extra yolk, and the vanilla. Keep whisking for a minute; the mixture should look glossy.
3. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, bicarbonate of soda and fine salt.
4. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet with a spatula until no streaks of flour remain. Stop there. Overmixing makes the cookies tough.
5. Fold in the chopped chocolate, shards and dust included.
6. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, ideally overnight.
7. Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and line two baking trays with parchment. Roll the dough into balls of about 60 g and space them well apart; they spread.
8. Bake for 11 to 13 minutes, until the edges are set and golden but the centres still look slightly underdone.
9. Sprinkle with flaky salt and leave the cookies on the hot tray for 10 minutes to finish setting before moving them to a rack.