Seems simple enough, right? A cookie made from butter,flour, sugar, salt, eggs, leavening agents, and some chocolate. Think again. Use our primer to bake the cookie of your dreams with The Essential: Chocolate Chip Cookie.
Everybody’s got a type. Whether you know it or not, you’ve been refining your chocolate chip cookie taste from the time you were an 8-year-old scarfing down your grandmother’s special recipe fresh out of the oven. Maybe you like yours refined and crunchy, so-thin-it-could-be-a-cracker with a little sea salt sprinkled on top. Maybe you prefer a mountainous chewy-on-the-outside, gooey-on-the-inside (heavy-on-the-chocolate) cookie. You could be a Nestlé Toll House-style classicist. Maybe it just depends on your mood. Maybe you’re still searching, and this article is the answer to all indecisiveness.
There are few desserts more quintessentially American and iconic than the chocolate chip cookie. Dozens of bakers and bakeries around the country have hung their hats on putting their own special spin on Ruth Graves Wakefield’s revolutionary 1938 creation, now the Original Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie you can buy off the shelf. In our most delicious science experiment yet, we swapped out our aprons for lab coats to develop four recipes that let you tweak ingredients to bake your favorite style chocolate chip cookie from scratch. We tested, tested, and then tested again to achieve the perfect classic, cakey, crispy, and chewy chocolate chip cookies. Here, we break down the chemistry behind each style and tell you why manipulating certain variables and ingredient ratios brings certain results. We’ve got the answers, and only one question for you: What’s your type?
