Friday afternoon was another cold and dreary day so of course I had to bake. It was a long and crazy week for me and my husband so I cheered us up by making Alton Brown’s recipe for “The Chewy” chocolate chip cookie. We had missed our friend Mike’s birthday so I also made these for him, saved the batter in the fridge until right before we left so they were nice and fresh from the oven.
This is a bit of an unusual recipe because you do not cream room temperature butter with sugar. Nope, you melt it first! You melt it, dissolve it with the sugar, add the eggs and the vanilla and then the dry sifted ingredients like a regular cookie. Except, you use bread flour instead of all purpose! Then you add the chocolate chips to the batter and chill. The recipe does not say for how long so I chilled them for an hour.
I used my two-ounce ice cream scoop as specified and only baked six cookies at a time in a 375F oven.
The first batch were pretty darn perfect. Then I read (yes, I forgot to read the whole recipe) that you are supposed to turn the sheets around after 5 minutes. Which I did afterwards and then I had problems with over baking and then under baking. When I made Mike’s I did not turn them around, I just baked for around 14 minutes and they were fine. These cookies are so big though that they do go darker than I like them to be, since you have to keep them in long enough to bake all the way through. Next time I might use my smaller scoop and bake them for a shorter period of time.
I hope you enjoyed the cookies Mike! Once we got there I found out that Eric’s birthday had just passed as well. Time to do more baking!
These are pretty great cookies. They do not get hard over time but they are pretty challenging not to over bake at this size. I give these cookies three and a half out of five wooden spoons.
I love Alton’s chewy cookie recipe and prefer to make all my cookies like this. Yum!
Excellent review of the limits of following that recipe. We often forget that our house and our ovens as well as which particular ingredients we use may affect what we are making. Best to vary what we try then discard anything on the recipe that isn’t working for us than follow it blindly.
Those look good and melting butter is so much easier than creaming.
These look like winning cookies to me!
So chocolatey good. You’re such a sweetie, always baking cookies and cupcakes for all your friends on their birthdays. It really does make the occasion even sweeter.
I have done any baking hubby is trying to get me to make a pie.
Coffee is on.
I have done any baking hubby is trying to get me to make a pie.
Coffee is on.
These look so soft and chewy! I love your step-by-step collage with the written words.
That is interesting to melt the butter and use bread flour. Hmm…the cookies look delish, maybe I should give it a try.
We made cookies last weekend and used bread flour because that’s what we had. I didn’t know it would make a difference! Our cookies turned out great, so it worked!! 🙂 I really like Alton Brown – I like seeing your process in pictures.
Those cookies look so awesome, love how they have lots of chocolate chips 🙂 YUM!
Your pictures make me crave to eat cookies 🙂