MJ's Top Secret Chocolate Chip Cookies

MJ's Top Secret Chocolate Chip Cookies - made dough January 16, 2022 from Modern Honey

1 cup butter

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

1 large egg yolk

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chunks

3/4 cup milk chocolate chunks

1. In a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, melt butter. When completely melted, add brown sugar and granulated sugar; remove from heat. Whisk until mixture is glossy and combined. Let cool to room temperature.
2. Add egg, egg yolk and vanilla; stir well to combine.
3. Stir in flour, baking soda and salt until just combined. Fold in chocolate chips. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 30 minutes. Portion into golf-ball-size dough balls, cover or wrap in plastic and refrigerate an additional 24-36 hours.
4. If not ready to bake after the additional chilling time, place in freezer bags and freeze.
5. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper and evenly space dough balls. Bake 12-15 minutes or until edges are set and middles are just barely past the raw stage. Remove from oven and let cool on baking sheets for several minutes. Transfer to wire rack to cool completely.

I'm randomly trying out new chocolate chip cookie recipes again. I have a couple of good go-to recipes I use more often than not: this one for chewy and this one for dense-cakey-chewy.

Yet I still enjoy trying out new recipes, especially from a blog I've had good results from before. Like from Modern Honey.

There are many blogs touting they have the "best" recipe for something. And it could be true....for them. Everyone has different preferences though so I always take it all with a grain of salt.

But it doesn't mean they're not good or great. It's just that I have reservations about calling anything the best because they would only be my best, not necessarily anyone else's.

Case in point, this is a really good chocolate chip cookie. Not sure I'd consider it the best, based on my preferences for a chocolate chip cookie but that doesn't mean it wasn't really good. It was. 

This calls for melting the butter rather than creaming it so it has a dense, chewy texture. It also has a very rich brown-sugar-caramel flavor profile, a hallmark of an excellent chocolate chip cookie. The edges were crisp and the middle was chewy, another thing I prefer in my chocolate chip cookies.

I don't know if it was my oven or my baking time but the taste test cookie, pictured below, and a much more generous size than the ones I mailed out in care packages, got baked more evenly overall than I expected. Normally I bake cookies just until the edges are set and the middles are just barely past the raw state. Once the cookie cools, the texture is what I like best of being soft-chewy-dense while the edges are crisp.

This one baked all the way through so the whole thing was a more even texture of crisp-chewy throughout. I also don't know if my sweet tooth was taking a break but this was a little too sweet and a bit too rich for me. Still good but if you want it less rich or to cut the sweetness, I'd scale back on the milk chocolate chips.

If the taste test cookie looks markedly different from the rest of the cookies pictured above, it's because, due to my preference for milk chocolate, I portioned out a chunk of the dough to only mix with milk chocolate chips then I added semisweet chips, mini chocolate chips and caramelized cocoa nibs to the rest of the dough for the cookies I was giving away.

In hindsight, that might not have been the best move as the cookie itself was rich enough without me adding a ton of (large) milk chocolate chips to it. Hence why my sweet tooth might have cried uncle on me.