Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies: Part 1

So the bf and I started on our aforementioned quest yesterday. We essentially took over his family's kitchen to make just cookies. Our lunch was pretty much cookies and some milk, which was perfectly fine by me. And because I was half joking/half serious, I made a whole lab report for our escapades.

Objective: To find the formulation for perfect chocolate cookies - dense, good toffee/caramel flavor, large pockets of chocolate, good salty/sweet balance, crispy on the edges and gooey/chewy in the middle, with good depth of flavor

Materials: Private selection semisweet chocolate chips, 8 oz semisweet chocolate bars chopped into small chunks, all purpose flour, vanilla extract, unsalted butter, baking soda, salt, sea salt for sprinkling, dark brown sugar, granulated sugar

Methods:
1) Follow the recipe in Recipe from Super Detailed Article to the tee
2) Make any adjustments
3) Eat all the cookies

Observations and Results:

Trial One: Following the recipe

• The cookies spread a lot in the oven and turned out a wonderful nutty, caramelized brown. 
• Because they spread a lot, they ended up being wide, flatter cookies that were dense but not as thick as we would have liked
• The flavor was pretty good, but we might have chopped the chunks too small because we didn't get the large pockets of chocolate that we wanted
• The tops of the cookies were pretty smooth, instead of slightly irregular which is what we wanted but hey, smooth cookies are fine as long as they taste great anyways

Alright, so why did they turn out so flat and wide? I think its' because when browning the butter, I did a pretty good job, which is why the cookies have that wonderful caramel color. However, when cooling the browned butter, I didn't cool it enough. The butter was cooled down enough when added to the egg/white sugar/vanilla mixture but it wasn't yet solid enough. I had added the ice cube, popped it into the fridge, and whisked the browned butter over ice bath before adding it,  but it wasn't quite cooled enough yet. This caused the dough to be more slack and caused more cookie spread in the oven. 

Trial Two: More solid butter, different chocolate

So when we went to Krogers for baking provisions, my boyfriend wanted the Kroger brand Private Selections semi sweet chocolate chips. What a great choice. We wanted to use chocolate chips for this trial because we were hoping we'd get the large chocolate pockets we didn't get in Trial One. When we opened the chocolate chip bag, we expected regular size chips - NOPE. They were HUGE, essentially chips the size of large, 0.5 inch chunks. So honestly, if you can't find chocolate chips that big, just chop your semisweet chocolate bar into larger chunks, which we might try and do again next time. We just liked the chips because they're more like the traditional chocolate chip cookie. Here's how the second batch turned out.

• This time when I made the browned butter, I decided it wasn't browned enough after I had added the ice cube so I put it back in the pan and browned it more. Then I whisked the browned butter over ice bath the whole time instead of just putting it into the fridge. I whisked it constantly until the whole solution turned opaque and it seemed to be like a soft butter paste.
• However, I didn't brown the butter as much for this trial so that's why the cookies aren't as caramel brown as the first batch 

The result: Because the browned butter was so much more solid (consistency of soft spreadable margarine), the dough was also more solid, less sticky, and the cookies spread less in the oven. This led to -
  ~ Taller, thicker cookies
  ~  Smaller diameter cookies because of less spread
  ~ Really gooey pockets because of those huge chocolate chips

Conclusion:

We both liked the Trial 2 cookies more, because we liked the gooey-ness and the thicker cookies.

On the left, Trial One; On the right, Trial Two

However, the methods weren't as consistent as I would've liked because the butter wasn't browned enough in Trial Two. But hey, that's life, improv is the spice of life in the kitchen. Despite the fact that we made some killer chocolate chip cookies, we both agreed that we hadn't reached perfection yet. Due to travel limitations, we weren't able to rest the dough over night. But in a few weeks, we're going to be able to try resting the dough in the fridge for 2-3 days and then baking to compare flavors. In the mean time, we ended up with two batches of 28 cookies each, so we've got ourselves happily occupied until we can try the next trials.

Nothing is better than a full counter and the smell of baked goods. To be continued...