The Totally Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie

Today was the unstructured day of the long weekend for the Shattuck 5 ring circus. Kelsey hung out with her friends, watching L. play baseball, and then heading to the pool for her first swim of the season. Drew worked the phones hard in order to coordinate a kick ball game at the school playground. Erin joined A.'s family for the afternoon, then the girls headed back to our house for the evening sleepover. And I enjoyed a quiet late afternoon in the kitchen trying out a new recipe.

I came across a recipe in Cook's Illustrated for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. I was intrigued, especially as I read that they made more than 700 cookies trying to come up with the perfect blend of ingredients. I have a recipe for "The Practically Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie." This go-to recipe is pretty straightforward and fairly quick, and it yields decent results. I wouldn't say my cookies are to die for; I would put them more in the range of "good enough."

If you're not familiar with Cook's Illustrated, you should know that my dream job is to work in their test kitchens, but I am nowhere near qualified. I have found their recipes to be a bit time consuming, but absolutely worth the effort. When I take the time to follow the instructions exactly, I have never been disappointed. And so, with great anticipation, I tackled this new version of the chocolate chip cookie.

The method surprised me a bit. Conventional wisdom says to use butter that's room temperature if you want to produce cookies that don't spread all over the pan, but this recipe calls for almost all the butter to be melted and browned to a caramel color. Basically what you end up doing is coming close to making a toffee base, and all the stirring is done by hand with a whisk - no electric mixer. The process of making the dough for these cookies took more than twice as long as a regular batch, but I have just one thing to say: Best.Cookies.Ever.

These cookies were were crisp on the edges and chewy in the middle. They were gooey with chocolate, and the dough was not only sweet, it had a buttery, caramely-toffee depth to it that's absent in my other recipe. The only downside? A single batch of dough takes twice as long and only produces 14-16 cookies!

So, when I need to mass produce homemade cookies, I'll use my standard recipe. When I want to impress people, I'll make The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie. Perfection never tasted so good!