Chocolate Chip Cookies by Rose Beranbaum
Yep, they look pretty appetizing
Time: 1hour 40 minutes + 24 hours
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Difficulty: 1/5
Chocolate chip cookies are the best cookies and you can’t change my mind. Given that this recipe is in a book called The Baking Bible, I have pretty high expectations. I’m not the biggest fan of nuts in desserts, but this recipe calls for walnuts and I’ll stay true to the book. Hey, I like walnuts on their own, so maybe this cookie will change my mind.
Key Ingredients and Omissions:
This is a chocolate chip cookie and most of the ingredients that show up in any other chocolate chip cookie show up here. With that being said, there’s not anything special or key about the ingredients. One note is that I used a mixture of dark and light brown sugar in the cookies, as I ran out of the dark sugar.
Tools:
Stand mixer
Fine Mesh Sieve
Cooking Review:
Brown Butter: 17 minutes
To start, I went ahead and browned the butter. This recipe says to do this on low heat, which is a good idea to prevent the butter from popping and making a big mess. I let my butter take on a decently dark brown color before straining it through a fine mesh sieve and separating the appropriate amount of melted, clarified butter and adding back in the browned pieces caught in the sieve. You will probably have some butter left over from this step and I really don’t know what you should do with it or why it’s even important to separate the brown bits like this. Seems unnecessarily complex.
Toast Walnuts: 14 minutes
While I was browning the butter, I preheated the oven to get ready to toast the nuts. I added the nuts and toasted them for 7 minutes, stirring once. Then, I transferred the walnuts to a dry cloth and rubbed them together to remove the skins and break them up a bit. This is another kinda weird step. Why should I remove the walnut skins? I’m not sure this makes much of a difference the end.
Mix Dough: 26 minutes
The recipe calls for the butter to be cooled to below 80 degrees Fahrenheit before mixing it into the dough, which cost me some time. I did put it in the refrigerator to speed up the process a little. I mixed the eggs, sugars, and vanilla on a low speed (3 on my stand mixer) for about 2 minutes. Next, I mixed and added in the dry ingredients. Finally, I chopped up the walnuts and mixed them in along with the chocolate. Next, I split the dough in half and wrapped it in plastic wrap to be refrigerated.
Refrigeration: 26 hours
I refrigerated my dough for a couple hours more than a day. After this point, I put one of the batches in the freezer for later and got to work forming the cookies.
Warm & Form Cookies: 20 minutes
I let the dough sit out for 10 minutes to soften a little before breaking off portions of dough to make 10 even balls of dough that I rolled between my palms. I put the balls on a baking sheet and pressed them down with the bottom of a glass.
Baking: 9 minutes
I baked the cookies for 9 minutes total, turning the baking sheet 4 minutes in. I let them cool for about a minute before transferring them to a cooling rack.
Analysis:
These cookies are pretty average in my opinion. Yeah, they’re better than cookies you can buy from the grocery store, but they aren’t blowing me away. The exterior has a nice crispness, while the interior is soft and slightly chewy. There are plenty of chocolate chips, but the nuts are only here and there. In some bites the nuts only add a little crunch and in others you can actually taste them. While I can see why some people would like walnuts in a cookie like this, I think I could do without them. I’m disappointed that these cookies aren’t more buttery and that the browned notes don’t come through very much if at all. I’ve made better chocolate chip cookies from another cookbook, which I will be reviewing soon. These are pretty much what you would expect from a basic home made chocolate chip cookie, so I’ll give this recipe a. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t great, either. With the odd steps thrown in, I am kind of tempted to take another point, as they waste time to result in an unimpressive result, but I’ll leave it at that.
