{TWD} "Perfect" Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

For this week's Tuesday's With Dorie recipe, Kait of Kait's Plate chose a cookie Dorie calls "My Best Chocolate Chip Cookie" I made this recipe previously, back when my blog was just a few weeks old, and posted them here. At that point I had begun a quest in earnest to discover the best CCC recipe. My mission got pretty quickly derailed as I got caught up in lots of other baking for the weekly TWD recipes. I've managed to bake several other CCCs, and I've learned is that tastes really do vary in what constitutes the perfect CCC. Some people like cakey cookies, others prefer chewy, and thin and crispy cookies have their fans as well. I can safely say that Dorie's best CCCs weren't my best CCC, although plenty of people love them.

Seeing as I'd already tried Dorie's version of chocolate chip cookies, I figured that I might as well use this week to bake a new CCC contender. On this week's P&Q post for the Chocolate Chip Cookies a wonderfully helpful comment by Peggy the Baker mentioned a Cook's Illustrated chocolate chip cookie recipe that sounded very different and delicious. Bingo! I had the cookie to bake this for this week.


n.o.e.'s notes:

- You can find the CI recipe for "Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies" here or here. The recipe for Dorie's cookies is on Kait's post.

- The recipe has a very unusual method. About 2/3 of the butter is browned on the stovetop first, then the rest of the butter is added to the hot browned butter. Once the sugars - granulated sugar and dark brown sugar - are added, the mixture is whisked several times for 30 seconds at 3 minute intervals. Then the dry ingredients are stirred in, and finally, the chocolate.

- I did not want wimpy brown butter, so I kept it on the heat until the butter solids were quite dark, possibly too dark.

- The recipe for my old stand-by chocolate chip cookies (recipe on this post) has a little bit of lemon juice. I'm tired of saying to myself, "I like that new cookie recipe, but I miss the complexity that the lemon juice provides," so I added a teaspoon of lemon juice to my cookie dough. The flavor is undetectable as "lemon" and I've read that lemon juice makes cookies more tender.

- My baking buddy Leslie baked the cookies just before I did, and she gave me some tips. She suggested using a premium chocolate, and bittersweet (around 70% cocoa) rather than semi-sweet (usually in the 50-60% cocoa range, and added sweetness). I followed that suggestion. She loved the dough so much and mentioned that I might want to bake a cookie or two without any chocolate, so I did that, too. (By the way, go check out Leslie's wonderful CCC taste-off post which included her very own CCC recipe - it looks fantastic!)

- The recipe says to divide the dough into 16 pieces to bake. My dough weighed 888g, so I made several of the cookies 1/16 size, or 55.5g. Those cookies turned out to be pretty huge, so for the rest of the dough, I made 40 g balls of dough. They baked up to a more "normal" cookie size. I froze most of the balls for a future side-by-side comparison with some of my other favorite CCC recipes.

- I've got to note here that the raw dough, although a tiny bit greasy, had fantastic flavor.

the verdict:

I love the texture of this cookie, wonderfully chewy without being under-baked. I think I did over-brown my butter, so my cookies were ever so slightly bitter. The bittersweet chocolate was a good pairing with the flavors of the cookie, but I found myself wishing that I'd used a little more chocolate since bittersweet isn't as sweet as semisweet would have been. So these cookies were not perfect for me but they were very very good. I'd like to bake them again, making a few more adjustments.

Thanks, Kait, for choosing Dorie's chocolate chip cookies and giving me the opportunity to branch out this week.