high-bar baking

I knew this was true as a kid, but had a hard time articulating it. I loved when, making chocolate chip cookies, you got to the end of portioning dough. Because those dough balls had almost no chocolate chips in them. You got to make and then eat a CCC that didn’t have any chocolate chips. Good luck explaining the appeal of that to a fellow child.

I know now what I was after– brown sugar. I genuinely liked the cookie part of the cookie.  I wasn’t nearly as attached to the chocolate as everyone else seemed to be. It was a bag of hard, waxed, sorta-bitter low quality commodity chocolate, people. Save your high horses for a different race. 

I love chocolate, and I use the good stuff now. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand.

Sarah put out a recipe for Un-Chocolate Chip Cookies this week, which is a riff on her CCC 2.0 recipe without the chocolate. It’s different from her Brown Sugar Cookie slightly in ingredients but mostly in method. She bakes these at 400 degrees (not 350), lets them brown on top, then has you take them out while they’re still very soft in the middle. Then, once they’re out, she steals a move from Dorie who stole it from Moko Hirayama of Mokonuts — pressing the top of the puffed cookie with a spoon. 

The end result of all that manipulation is a cookie with a bottom that’s a solid disk of crisp sitting under a beautifully soft and chewy underbaked top. They’re amazing.

They differ from the Brown Sugar Cookies for that reason — the crunch. But it’s more than texture, because really cooking the bottom means you start to move into Maillard browning territory. Where the magic happens. So these, while still molasses-y, have more caramel notes than their sisters. A+, man. 

She also calls them “Chocolate Chip-less Cookies,” but that’s less fun. I say, having totally used that phrase word-for-word to describe my own “creations” as a child. But I like Un-Chocolate Chip Cookie because it reminds me of Alice in Wonderland and the Un-Birthday. It can’t always be your birthday. But you get 364 un-birthdays! What a lovely thought. 

Yes, we knew I was a child.