Crumbl Milk Chocolate Cookie - the "real" recipe?

1/4 the recipe - revised, made February 17, 2023

8 ounces salted butter
4 ounces granulated sugar

6 ounces brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

16 ounces all-purpose flour

1.25 tablespoons baking soda

1.25 tablespoons baking powder

1 tablespoon vanilla extract (my addition)

11 ounces milk chocolate 

1. Preheat oven to 290 degrees F. (I baked at 350 degrees F).
2. Cream butter, granulated sugar and brown sugar together on medium speed for 10 minutes, until light, fluffy and silky.
3. Add 1 egg and mix on low speed until just combined. Add remaining egg and beat on low speed until just combined.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and baking powder. Add dry ingredients all at once and mix on low speed until just combined. Mix in chocolate chips until evenly dispersed.
5. Weigh out 5.5-ounce portions of dough, roll into balls and tear each ball in half, pressing the smooth ends together so the jagged halves form the top. 
6. Line baking sheets with parchment paper and evenly space cookies. Bake for 16 minutes, rotating the pan at the 11-minute mark. Remove from oven and let cookies rest on baking sheets for 5-10 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool completely.  

I don't have a link to provide to the original source of this recipe as by the time I saw it on a random Facebook post, it had already been passed on from one person and one group to another. As near as I can figure out, it's supposedly been posted on Reddit and from a former Crumbl employee who's no longer under an NDA.

I'm a tad skeptical about that as every NDA I've ever signed didn't have an expiration date. Granted, that was all in the tech industry but I imagine food retail places that have proprietary recipes would be just as protective. So take this with a grain of salt (pun intended) whether this is the "real" Crumbl recipe for their milk chocolate chip cookies.

In any case, the person posting it didn't know the exact measurements of the leaveners so they guesstimated those. There wasn't any vanilla extract in the recipe either so I added it my version. Plus I can't stand baking at such a low temperature so I went with the standard 350 degrees instead of 290. So I guess this is just like any copycat trying to imitate the real thing rather than being an exact recipe of the OG Crumbl cookie.

I scaled down the recipe to be one-fourth of the original since I didn't need that many cookies. I was baking for care packages, not retail sale. The part of the recipe that I did follow "exactly" was beating the butter and sugars for 10 minutes. I normally don't beat for that long but I wanted to see what effect that would have on the cookies as most recipes don't call for beating more than 2-4 minutes.

And of course, I don't go by exact baking times but how the cookies look before I take them out of the oven.

What I found that these were good chocolate chip cookies and the added mixing time created the crisp shell on the outside and meltingly-soft texture on the inside. You can also see the big air pockets inside the cookie that comes from beating the mixture for so long. Not sure I liked this version better than any of the others. It's hard to make a faithful rendition of the original when you're a home baker, even with the "real" recipe. I have a Kitchen Aid, not a Hobart (commercial) mixer and I have a home oven, not a commercial baking oven. So I don't take copycats too seriously. If it's a good cookie, it's a good cookie. If I want the real thing, fortunately, I can buy it.