Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

I've posted several different chocolate chip recipes here, and all of them have been good. But I still look for new ones, trying to perfect crunchy chocolate chip cookies.  This recipe comes from The Art & Soul of Baking, which my hubby bought me many months ago after reading about it from another food blogger friend.  Everything I've made from this book has been amazing, so I wanted to try their cookie recipe.  The crazy thing about this recipe though it is that it is the exact same recipe that is on the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip bag, only that instead of 2 sticks of butter, it uses 1.5 sticks. Every other ingredient and proportion is exactly the same. Having a little less butter made me wonder if these cookies would spread less thin and stay more crunchy. That is exactly the case.  These came out wonderfully - a little soft on the inside, hard crunch outside, and really delicious.

The recipe called for the whole 12 oz bag of chocolate chips. I felt like it was too much.  Trying to stir all those chips into the dough, I felt like it was chocolate-overloaded. And the cookies do have more chips than they need.  My hubby disagreed and thought all the chips were great. Toasted walnuts were a great addition too.

From this dough I only baked half the batch (2 sheets of cookies or 27 total cookies total).  Doing the math, if I get about 40 cookies from this batch (maybe more) and omitted 1/2 stick of butter (400 calories and 40 grams of fat) from the recipe, I cut about a gram of fat from each one and got a better tasting cookie!

Chocolate Chip Cookies
1.5 sticks butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs (room temperature)
2 tsp vanilla extract
2.25 cups (11.25 oz) all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
12 oz chopped chocolate (or chips)
1/2 cup toasted walnuts

Preheat to 350.
Mix butter and sugars with electric mixer until smooth and blended (2 minutes or more).  Add the eggs, one at a time and vanilla. Blend well.
Whisk together flour, baking soda, salt.  Blend into butter mixture, at lowest speed.
Stir in chocolate and walnuts.

Spoon tablespoon-size portions of cookie dough onto sheets lined with parchment paper.  Bake cookies 10-12 minutes, turning once.

This batch made 55 cookies

 

 

Crunchy, delicious cookies