![]() ![]() I tried a variety of chocolate - dark, extra-dark, semi-sweet, bittersweet, chips, chunks and hand chopped. I found the trickiest part was balancing chewiness with crispy edges and a gooey center. Making a chewy cookie is about managing moisture - in the ingredients, the baking equipment and even the baking temperature. ![]() In addition, the type of chocolate used for the chips plays a large role in both the overall sweetness and the chocolatiness of the cookie. This is not merely a factor of how much sugar and how much salt, but also of what kind of sugar, what kind of salt and where and how they are incorporated. For example, a cookie “with a hint of salt” and “not too sweet” requires balancing the sweetness with the saltiness. Knowing that I was targeting several features of the cookie meant I couldn’t rely on one aspect of the cookie to compensate for deficiencies of other dimensions. I think the difference comes down to the intention while developing the recipe. This one had to be good enough to merit being called the best. I had nine very good cookies back in October. But this had to be more than just a very good cookie. The basic recipe on the back of the yellow bag - or on any bag of chocolate chips - will make a very good cookie. The methodology and ingredients are pretty simple. What makes this recipe different from all other recipes? After all, we are talking chocolate chip cookies here. The nuts were optional, and the cookie is better without them.” One of my taste testers screamed, “NO nuts!” I should note that despite the low level of interest indicated from the survey, I did include them as optional in the recipe. Try again.” to “Walnuts?! Why ruin a perfectly good cookie?!” “Walnuts have no place in a chocolate chip cookie” and “My great aunt invented the chocolate chip cookie in 1938. Comments ranged from, “No walnuts? That is not a real chocolate chip cookie. Turns out that while only 36% of survey respondents deemed nuts important, readers had a lot to say about their absence or presence. Yet (and I should know better than to be surprised), there was still a bit of controversy. One reader posted a photo on Facebook of a batch she made and noted, “They’re a keeper!!!” I am pleased to be able to say that it was well received. The cookie is chewy, gooey in the center (when warm), not too sweet with a hint of salt, crispy edges and chocolate chunks rather than chips (though I offer the option to swap in chips for the chunks if one prefers). Times Food website last Thursday and published in last Sunday’s Weekend section. The ultimate chocolate chip cookie recipe was posted on the L.A. The task was to develop a recipe for a cookie with as many of the top-rated properties as possible, looking at features with more than 50% importance as the cutoff. This seemed to me a clear call to action. None had more than two of the top seven characteristics on the list. Reviewing the survey responses I quickly understood why none of those nine cookies stood out above the rest. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Instead we settled for the top three favorites and decided to ask our readers what is most important to them in a chocolate chip cookie. I tested nine reader favorites and, while there were many redeeming qualities among them, our tasting panel could not determine a single best, winning cookie. I’m Julie Giuffrida, filling in this week for Ben Mims, and (surprise, Mom!) five months later I have even more to say about making America’s favorite cookie.īack in October, I was in search of the best chocolate chip cookie recipe among the dozens in our archives. One might think that chocolate chip cookies are not particularly remarkable, but they are America’s favorite cookie, and aficionados have distinct opinions about them. After reading my “ Quest for the best chocolate chip cookie” story from the fall, in which I compared nine chocolate chip cookies from our recipe archives, my mother (a retired caterer) commented that she never knew there was so much to say about chocolate chip cookies. ![]()
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