Alton Brown’s Secret for a Perfectly Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie
If baking is a science, then chocolate chip cookies are the ultimate experiment. The thing is, most of us don’t actually want to do any of the hypothesizing or testing or analyzing ourselves. Rather, just tell us which ingredients and mixing methods yield the best results, and we’ll happily start baking from there.
That’s where Alton Brown comes in. Known for breaking down the science of recipes, I trusted his chocolate chip cookies would be tested to perfection — ingredients purposefully chosen to yield a specific, delicious result. Would he prove me right, or would I find myself eating another average cookie? I had to find out.
Get the recipe: Alton Brown’s The Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie
How to Make Alton Brown’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Alton Brown’s chocolate chip cookie recipe is a bit more complicated than most. You have to sift together the dry ingredients (one of which is bread flour — not exactly a common pantry ingredient), separately whisk together the egg, egg yolk (yes, there’s an egg yolk in this chocolate chip cookie recipe), milk, and vanilla, then add the egg mixture to the butter and sugar in the stand mixer before gradually streaming in the dry ingredients. The dough must then chill for one hour before you scoop and bake the cookies.
Although it dirtied an extra dish, I did like that this recipe called for melted butter because it eliminated the need to set out butter to soften several hours before I planned to start baking.
What I Thought of the Results
These cookies were delightful. They’re big — you’ll shape them into 1 1/2-ounce portions, which is about 2 tablespoons each — but they don’t spread much, leaving you with dense, wonderfully chewy cookies that have so much more flavor than your typical one. That’s because I was right — Alton has put a lot of scientific thought into his recipe, tweaking and testing until he came up with this winner.
Alton began his cookie quest with the recipe for Nestlé Toll House Cookies. To give these cookies their signature ultra-chewy texture, he made three major changes: He swapped the all-purpose flour for bread flour (increasing the protein content, which means more chew); used one egg, one egg yolk, and 2 tablespoons whole milk in place of two eggs; and opted for more brown sugar than white sugar.
This isn’t the type of cookie you casually take a bite of as you pass through the kitchen. This is the kind of cookie you relish: carefully picking out the best one from the cookie sheet, bringing it over to the table with a tall glass of milk, and savoring every single bite of it.
If You Make Alton Brown’s Chocolate Chip Cookies …
1. Buy a food scale. Alton’s recipe calls for ingredients in ounces instead of cup measurements, and while you can go through the trouble of converting it, I would encourage you to use this as an excuse to purchase a food scale if you don’t already have one. Once you own it, you’ll quickly realize why so many home bakers prefer recipes that include weight measurements — no more spooning and leveling flour or dirtying a whole set of measuring cups. This OXO scale is Alton’s favorite.
2. You don’t actually need a paper plate. Alton asks you to sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda on a paper plate, but the purpose of the flexible plate is just to make it easier on you to pour the ingredients into the stand mixer later on. If it’s easier, feel free to sift your ingredients onto a piece of parchment paper instead (which you can fold into a funnel when it comes time to mix them in).
3. Use chopped chocolate or chocolate disks. The only disappointing thing about this recipe is that the cookies don’t look quite like the ones on Alton’s website. In his photo, the chocolate is super molten and melty, and the best way to achieve that is to ditch chocolate chips and opt for disks or chopped chocolate instead, which are better melters. Next time, I’ll use Valrhona chocolate feves.
Overall Rating: 9/10
If I didn’t have to wait for the dough to chill for an hour, these would have gotten a perfect 10.
Get the recipe: Alton Brown’s The Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie