The best chocolate chip cookies
Life is better with chocolate chip cookies at the ready, and my favorite recipe makes it easy.
I just put a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough into the fridge, and I figured I should tell you about the recipe I use. It's from Sally's Baking, it's her Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe. She has several recipes for chocolate chip cookies; I haven't tried all of them, only that one, and it was so good I didn't bother to try the others.
Sally McKenney
For years I was happy with the classic recipe on the back of the bag of Nestle Toll House chips, but I like this one better. It has three features that set it apart:
- It uses melted butter, instead of room temperature butter. I love this, because I hate waiting for my butter to come to room temperature. (I know plenty of warming-butter shortcuts, they all suck to various degrees.) Also, melted butter means this can all get mixed by hand with a bowl and spoon, no appliance necessary.
- It uses cornstarch, which along with the melted butter gives the cookies a just-right texture: chewy, but also soft.
- It uses a whole egg plus an extra yolk, for rich decadence.
Sally's recipe is fantastic, the instructions are detailed and if you follow them you will wind up with cookies you'll be proud of. I won a neighborhood baking contest with this recipe!
I use Guittard semisweet chocolate chips. They often land at or near the top of taste tests, plus it's a local company, and it's fun to keep a bit of San Francisco's chocolate history alive.
After making the dough, I let it rest in the fridge overnight (this improves most cookie recipes). The next day, I shape the dough into individual balls, freeze them on a cookie sheet, and then stick them in a big gallon-size ziploc bag. That way, I can bake cookies on demand, I just add a minute or two to the bake time.
To make them sing, I add a little tiny pinch of Maldon sea salt flakes when the cookies are right out of the oven.
I once tried to fancy this recipe up by browning the melted butter, and it didn't work great. I think two things happened: 1) the butter lost too much water during browning, and 2) I let the browned butter cool for too long, which throws off the texture of these cookies. I suspect this could be easily fixed by adding a little water back to the butter, but I came to realize that browning the butter wasn't actually going to elevate these cookies. I was just making things harder than they needed to be.1
I've never been disappointed with a cookie recipe from Sally's site, and I've tried a bunch of them. Every year, the box of Christmas cookies I give folks is about half Sally's recipes. She recently launched a free community discussion forum where folks help each other with baking. She has had a large, active discussion group on Facebook, but Facebook is not kind to small businesses like Sally's, so it's smart of her to take the reins and create a community space that isn't subject to Facebook's whims.
I hope you'll consider keeping chocolate chip cookies ready to go in your freezer, whatever recipe you prefer. You deserve an easy treat. I want that for you.
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