high-bar baking

This is the first recipe I’m going to cite as “mine,” even if it’s a 50/50 mashup of Claire’s ingredients and Sarah’s instructions. I worked hard enough on testing it for it to count. 

Recipe

• 226 g (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 28 g (2 tablespoons) heavy cream, half-and-half, or whole milk
• 260 g (2 cups) King Arthur all-purpose flour (accept no substitutions. You can read the whole post or you can just trust me)
• 6 g (2 teaspoons) Diamond Crystal kosher salt
• 6 g (1 teaspoon) baking soda
• 150 g (¾ cup packed) dark brown sugar
• 150 g (¾ cup) granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs, cold from the refrigerator
• 15 g (1 tablespoon) vanilla extract
• 113 g (4 ounces) bittersweet chocolate disks, half coarsely chopped
• 113 g (4 ounces) milk chocolate disks, half coarsely chopped

Modifications/Notes:

• brown 1 stick of butter and let 1 stick sit in the bowl
• form the doughballs into 1/4 cup (yes, you read that right) scoops
• rest in the fridge for 2 but preferably 3 days before baking at 350F for ~15 minutes, rotating after like 10

In a story I will tell another time, I went on a six week quest to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie (CCC). The almost-unanimous winner (yes, I gave myself more than one vote; it was a solo venture) was Claire Saffitz’s chocolate chip cookies. I had made them many times before, but never like this. I’d always loved the way they tasted, but the texture was, to put it kindly, subpar. They were wrinkled and lacy and oh-so flat. I know there are people out there for whom that sounds amazing, but this is my party, and that is bad. Get it through your head. I wanted a cookie that existed, not one that was doing its best to round down to two-dimensional. 

But they tasted so good. So I’d make them, on occasion, and I included them in this competition. In my preparation, though, I did something I hadn’t done in years, possibly since before the very first time I baked this recipe. I watched the video of Claire making them. And I noticed something I’d never seen before — when she browns half the butter and combines it with the other half and the cream, she lets it emulsify. She lets it chill. It goes completely opaque. I had never done that before. I hadn’t thought it mattered. In the spirit of doing everything exactly, exactly to recipe, for the CCC bracket I mimicked her precisely. And I finally got the cookie she’d always wanted me to have. The cookie that decorated the pages of Dessert Person, the cookie she held up in the YouTube video. It had texture, and with texture she squeaked by with a win. 

She sort of tied with Lagerstrom’s elevated back-of-the-bag recipe, but we’ll put that aside for now. She won, but I only made the dough one time. For every subsequent week of the bracket, I baked off one of the saved dough balls from the freezer. 

Then my friend had a birthday party, and I wanted to make her a banger of a cookie for it. I thought, what better present than the winner of my CCC bracket? So in January, seven months after the original competition, I remade Claire’s recipe for the first time. 

And it flopped.

Lacy was back. I was crushed. It was three days after I’d put the dough together, and two hours before meeting up with my friend. There was nothing to do but stew. I took them anyway, because you can’t waste a CCC, and because they still had stellar flavour. They just broke my heart on texture. (I actually found out much later that my friend has been obsessed with these cookies since then, and her sister’s been trying to replicate them for her because she loved them that much. That’s very flattering, but I also feel a little bad that we all went down this rabbit hole!)

So that was attempt 1. The original recipe, made to Claire’s original specifications. Spread, lacy, wrinkly. Delicious, and wrong. Remember, this is my quest, and I will pass judgment however I see fit. 

In attempt 2, I figured that the cookies were too wet. It’s always seemed like there’s too much liquid for them to work correctly, so I thought I’d start there. I removed the 28g of liquid (milk, half and half, or cream) that Claire adds back in to compensate for the water loss browning the second stick of butter. And there was basically no change. I also tried raising the oven temperature on a couple of them, just to see if the root cause was my oven going on the fritz between summer and now. Going up to 375 did cause them to spread less, but it didn’t fix their fundamental shape. And they got browner, to nobody’s surprise.

Attempt 3: halving the baking soda. The mnemonic rule of thumb is “Powder puffs and soda spreads,” and I wanted less spreading. There was noticeably less spreading on this iteration, but we still had the same fundamental shape. Edges that bled into the pan, wrinkles, flat. It reminded me of a concept we debated endlessly (why?) in college: the edgeless brownie. They have contraptions out there that you can insert into brownie pans to segregate each slice and turn every brownie into a four-sided edge. Completed edged brownies; some person’s dream, I’m confident (but not mine). What do enterprising college students do, presented with this information? Ask if you can do it the other way. Can you create a brownie that has no edge at all? Using ridiculous physics, of course, not by cutting off all the crusts. That’s be too easy. A spherical mold should be involved to even be worth talking about, duh. But I didn’t want a CCC that tapered into nothing as it slowly approached the pan. I wanted a real cookie. Next try.

Attempt 4: At this point I was just guessing. (Aren’t we all?) I substituted baking powder for baking soda, just to see what would happen. I was trying to put myself back in time and imagine what I could possibly have messed up this summer when I made the recipe. Was it possible I had used baking powder instead of baking soda?? It didn’t seem likely, but what was I supposed to think? Do you have any idea how hard it is to figure out a mistake you potentially made, but maybe didn’t make, seven months ago? I felt like I was losing my mind. Completely grasping at straws. 

As a former coworker liked to say, “I have effected change!” They were different, alright. This version did have more of a cookie texture, but the cookies were flat as hell. They were completely smooth on top. The edge was right, but little else was. 

For everyone playing along at home, this is where I got mad. I crown you queen of the CCC universe and you play me like THIS? I was sick and tired of this little adventure. Nothing was turning out the way I wanted it to, and I wanted it all to be over. So I threw my hands up in the air and turned to a cookie that I knew wouldn’t let me down — Sarah’s Brown Butter CCCs. 

Attempt 5: I made Sarah’s BBs in the form factor of Claire’s cookies. I used my quarter cup scoop, I used Claire’s amount of salt (2 tsp of Diamond Crystal kosher instead of 3/4 tsp table), and I let them rest in the fridge for the three days I’d been using for my other tests. Technically Claire’s recipe only calls for 2 days, but during my bracket testing a couple of cookies (looking at you, NYT!) called for 3 days, and I wanted to normalize everything that I could. Since 3 days is objectively better anyway, it’s what I’ve used ever since. By the by, the Sarah’s BBs are so useful because they do not require any resting time. They made honourable mention in my competition as the best cookie that doesn’t require any resting, and I make them fairly regularly because they scratch that itch so perfectly without needing advance notice.

I knew they were going to turn out well, that was why I made them, and they did. They had the correct shape (finally, something goes right!), but interestingly they had a flaky outside. I don’t know how to describe it any other way; I know it’s confusing, because pastry (croissants, biscuits, pie crust) flakes on the inside, but these cookies are covered in little ridges that can only be described as flakes. The NYT CCC recipe and the Preppy Kitchen CCC both had this phenomenon, I discovered in the summer. I don’t know what it is that causes it; someday maybe I’ll trace that one down. While it’s lovely, it’s not what I’m going for, so we had to press on. This time, though, I continued coming at perfection from a direction of “this is working, let’s optimize it,” which is much better from which to operate, for me at least. 

Attempt 6: Continuing off of attempt 5, adding in the half stick of butter that Claire has and Sarah doesn’t. This means that instead of browning one stick and adding it to 4T of butter, I browned one stick and added it to an entire other stick. More water and a little more fat, is what we’re looking at. My notes say only this, exclamation included: “We have height!”

But I’m not in this to get close. I’m in it to win. The game is afoot, and I’ve got the fire again.

Attempt 7: A remake of attempt 6, except this time with two full eggs. Sarah uses an egg and a yolk, and Claire calls for 2 eggs. I’m trying to go from working-Sarah to not-working-Claire one step at a time, and this is next on the list. There’s a strong Nalgene ring and a good center, but the cookies are back to being too flat. What’s a Nalgene ring? A Nalgene ring is my name for the exact amount of crunch I’m looking for in a cookie, specifically a well-made CCC. If you remember 2010, or if you happen to still carry around a Nalgene like I do, you’ll remember that the bottom of a Nalgene doesn’t sit flat on the countertop. The exterior ring of the water bottle presses on the surface, and the center of the circle rises a little bit and doesn’t make contact with the ground. If you were to dip the bottom in paint, the mark you’d make would be a ring. A wine bottle has the same bottom but more dramatic, if that helps you picture it. In a cookie, I want the underside of the exterior edge (where the ring would be if this cookie was a Nalgene) to be sharply crisp-crunchy, while the bottom of the cookie is only sort of crisp and the center is soft. I want a perfect Nalgene ring. Unfortunately, Attempt 7 left us with pancakes in the bargain, so we had to move on. 

Attempt 8: Now we’re cooking with gas. Same recipe as before, but the variable we changed this time was the flour. Back in the “guessing at what I did last time” game, I flipped through the introduction to Dessert Person. Claire does specifically mention that King Arthur is the flour brand she uses. Did I know that last year? I don’t remember knowing it, but this wouldn’t be the first piece of information I’d ever misplaced in my life. Maybe I used it in the summer and forgot that I had. So that’s what attempt 8 was, using King Arthur’s AP instead of the generic Costco 25 pound bag. The result? “Really, really close. Good height, great flavour.” 

I’d mostly cracked it at this point, but now I had to go all the way. Could I add the original extra liquid back? Eight was unfortunately a little drier than I wanted it to be. Which could have been an number of things, from overcooking them slightly to falling victim to the placebo of me knowing they had less liquid than they “should.” So Attempt 9 was, built off everything I’d done before, adding back in those 28g of milk. 

Here I finally realized that part of the charm of Claire’s cookie is that half the chocolate is chopped so fine as to melt completely into the background of the cookie, which really enhances the dough. Doing her style with only pops of chocolate, even good chocolate, doesn’t hit nearly as hard. So I knew there was at least one more round in me. It had great flavour though, and good height. There was a great Nalgene ring, and a good sunken center too. That means the soft center is underdone and will turn to that lovely magical center-of-a-cookie texture when it cools. A couple of the batch were funky, and I noted that I think the oven wasn’t completely-completely preheated before they went it. Better safe than sorry, guys. 

Attempt 10: Everything preceding + distributed chocolate. I even made a full batch this time. I won’t lie to you, they are beautiful. And they have enough liquid this time; I think it did really matter. Especially because the liquid’s a little fatty (we do love milk), and I have to imagine that helps with flavour too. 

Am I happy that I found it? Did I find it? I think so. To both. Unexpectedly, I think I’m a little sad that it’s over. 

But wait — there’s more! While Attempt 9 was in the fridge, my friend texted me a Reddit thread about the Costco Butter Conspiracy. People are alleging that this year the Kirkland butter changed somehow, and that all their usual tried-and-true Christmas recipes were failing in unexpected ways. Could this have been my problem? Unless I accidentally run out, I use Costco butter for all of my baking.

But that will be a story for another day.