chewy cookies

Alton Brown's Chewy Cookies

Sorry I've been been such a bad blogger. I have been baking and taking pictures of it so I'll post that stuff later. To start you off, here is a recipe I made yesterday. I was searching the interwebs looking for cupcake blogs and cookie recipes when I came across this recipe that intrigued me. It received alot of good reviews so I wanted to test it out. I also was intrigued by the fact that this recipe called for bread flour instead of the usual all purpose. Also, now I have an excuse to make bread because I have the flour for it. Alton has three different recipes for his cookies: chewy, thin and puffy. If I remember correctly, the puffy cookies use cake flour to achieve their "puffy" shape. It's really interesting to compare the three recipes and see how the slight differences in ingredients, etc creates a different type of cookie. It seems like a good jumping off point for beginning your own experimentation. So....check them out! They were definitely delicious. These were made with semi-sweet and were great but I could see them being amazing with darker 60% or 70% cocoa chips that would really flourish against the amount of butter in the cookie dough.

Here's the recipe

Alton Brown's "The Chewy" chocolate chip cookies:

2 sticks unsalted butter
2 1/4 cups bread flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Hardware:
Ice cream scooper (#20 disher, to be exact)
Parchment paper
Baking sheets
Mixer
Directions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Melt the butter in a heavy-bottom medium saucepan over low heat. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.
Pour the melted butter in the mixer's work bowl. Add the sugar and brown sugar. Cream the butter and sugars on medium speed. Add the egg, yolk, 2 tablespoons milk and vanilla extract and mix until well combined. Slowly incorporate the flour mixture until thoroughly combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Chill the dough, then scoop onto parchment-lined baking sheets, 6 cookies per sheet. Bake for 14 minutes or until golden brown, checking the cookies after 5 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet for even browning. Cool completely and store in an airtight container.

Notes:

I just used a large spoon instead of an ice cream scooper and just rolled the pieces in my hands to form a ball.

If you don't feel like using your mixer/creating the added clean up, creaming the butter/sugar with a whisk worked fine for me.

I also made one batch at 375 degrees and another at 350. I like the slightly larger cookies that come out when you bake at a lower temp, plus my oven tends to bake pretty fast as these took 10 minutes instead of the suggested 14 min.