The chocolate chip cookie is truly an American classic and a staple in just about any food or baking blog. For most recipes I usually look for similar recipes on other blogs, but for this recipe, what’s the point?

One of my favorite geology professors, Gerry Weber, liked to say, “All food is good, some is better”. He was also once overheard saying, “Don’t ever give cookies to stoners. They don’t appreciate them, they just eat ‘em.” Are all cookies good?

To the contrary: when you think of all the home made chocolate chip cookies you have had in your life, you realize that some people can really screw them up. In the last 30 years of making cookies I have probably made this recipe more than any other cookie, but I actually believe that the chocolate chip cookie is one of the more challenging cookies I have on my site.

For years I made this with a Sunbeam Mixmaster with no issues. Then, 12 years ago, my wife bought me my dream machine: a limited edition 5 quart KitchenAid mixer. I eagerly cranked out a batch of chocolate chip cookies, toll house recipe, and they turned out horrible. Very thin, crispy things full of holes that I could barely coax off the cookie sheets. I made them again and the same thing happened. Was it the mixer, me, or the new house I had just moved into with a different oven?

Few cookies are as sensitive to the quality of ingredients, mixing method, cookie sheet, oven and chef. Discouraged with a couple batches in the trash, I tried some of my other cookie recipes and fortunately they turned out great. After a little experimenting I found that if I increased the amount of flour that the cookies were better. The moral of the story: just because it is baking doesn’t mean you can’t adjust things a little to suit your needs, tastes or environments. Seems obvious now, but remember that there were no food blogs in 1994.

For this chocolate chip cookie recipe there isn’t much I have done to the original toll house recipe except: double the vanilla, increase the flour by 1/4 cup, substitute dark brown sugar for light brown, and use dark chocolate chips. I’m currently favoring Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chocolate chips because they taste great and are a little wider than regular chips.

Ingredients for making Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Add 2 eggs to 1 cup of salted butter and mix.

After adding 3/4 cups of granulated and 3/4 cups of dark brown sugars, add 2 teaspoons of vanilla.

Mix together 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda and 2 1/2 cups of unbleached flour together.

Slowly add the dry ingredients a little at a time while mixing on low.

Mix in dark chocolate chips by hand to prevent breaking them in mixer.

Roll dough into 1 1/4 inch balls.

Space rolled dough evenly on ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake cookies for 11-13 minutes in 375° F oven.

The recipe pictured above, with detailed instructions and complete photo gallery can be found on the Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe page.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Cookies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.