Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am a very lucky girl. Not only do I have wonderful friends and family, but I'm marrying into a wonderful family too. And I was lucky to have all of them, my old and new family, in attendance at my bridal shower last week.

Little by little I'm starting to use each of my shiny new kitchen gadgets, but one of the first that I was eager to break out was the Kitchenaid Mixer. Oh, it's pretty.

And what better way to break it in than chocolate chip cookies? Being a big fan of Alton Brown (my inner nerd is showing) I decided to try one of his essential chocolate chip cookie recipes - he does The Thin, The Puffy, and The Chewy, and I settled on the latter. No particular reason, but chewy sounded good at the time (spoiler alert: I was right).

Alton Brown's The Chewy


Source
Good Eats - "Three Chips for Sister Marsha" (Season 3, Episode 6)
Food Network recipe

Yield
Recipe says 30, I got 26 out of it. Maybe my cookies were slightly bigger, maybe Cookie Monster snuck in and stole 4 cookies when I wasn't looking, maybe I ate some of the cookie dough along the way, I don't know. I can't really say.

Equipment
Heavy-bottom medium saucepan
Flour sifter
Mixer (hand or stand)
2 baking sheets
Parchment paper (ok, I admit, I skipped the parchment paper bit. I didn't notice any negative effects of it, but that could be because I was neurotically hovering over the cookies while they were baking, or because of something to do with my baking sheets themselves.)
Ice cream scoop
Cooling rack

Ingredients
1 lb. Unsalted butter
2 1/4 cups Bread flour
1 tsp. Kosher salt
1 tsp.  Baking soda
1/4 cup Sugar
1 1/4 cups Brown sugar
1 Egg
1 Egg yolk
2 tbsp. Milk
1 1/2 tsp. Vanilla extract
2 cups Semi-sweet chocolate chips

Don't judge me by my organic milk! We don't drink milk much, and the organic just lasts longer. I'm not a milk snob, I promise!

Directions
Heat oven to 375°.

Over low, melt the butter in a heavy-bottom medium saucepan.

While the butter is melting, sift together the flour with the salt and baking soda and set aside.

In a good size mixing bowl (if you're using a hand mixer) or in the bowl of a stand mixer, pour the melted butter over the white and brown sugar.

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On medium speed, cream the sugar and butter. 

It takes a good few minutes but you'll end up with a smooth, thick liquid.

Add the egg and egg yolk...

the milk and vanilla extract...

... and mix until completely combined.

Slowly add the flour mixture little by little until you get a thick dough,

then stir in the chocolate chips. I did this by hand, but you could continue to use the mixer for it.

Chill the dough. The recipe doesn't say for how long, but I chilled it for an hour and that seemed to work well. Then using an ice cream scoop (very important not to do it by hand or spoon!), scoop balls of dough onto parchment-lined (or not) baking sheets.

So apparently I don't follow directions well. I missed the bit about "only 6 cookies per sheet." But going back to me being a lucky girl, nothing disastrous happened. Since I chilled the dough well, and resisted using my hands to scoop the balls, the butter maintained its integrity and the cookies didn't spread more than they were supposed to. But I think next time, just to be sure, I'll follow AB's advice and only bake 6 at a time.

They take about 12-14 minutes to be perfectly done, but start checking them at about 5 minutes, as you'll want to turn the baking sheet around once they seem to be about halfway done.

Transfer quickly to a cooling rack so they don't continue to cook from the heat of the pan.

I'm not gonna lie, these turned out pretty damn close to perfect. I thought 2 cups of chocolate chips was a little much, I could have used a bit more cookie. Next time I might cut that down a bit. Other than that though, they were the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever made. They were soft, and chewy, and heavenly, and remained so until they were all gone. Which was the next day.