Flat and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies: Sophisticated, Elegant, and Perfect for its Genre

Do you need another chocolate chip cookie recipe for your arsenal?  I really was not looking for one – beyond the America’s Test Kitchen recipe, about which I already have written here. However, sometimes I am compelled to try a variant or new recipe just for fun.

The October issue of Saveur featured Amanda Hesser’s Flat and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie, excerpted from her latest publication, The Essential New York Times Cookbook.  This is a wonderful cookbook, I must tell you, even though I have yet to make anything else from it after receiving it at Xmas – the recipes span the more than 150 years the NYT has been publishing on food.

Also in that edition of Saveur, my favourite food writers Jane and Michael Stern wrote about some of the glories of central Ohio cuisine.  There are many varied and delightful specialties in that area of the Buckeye State, some of which I have sampled on road trips.  I liked the Stern’s description of a tantalizing chicken noodle soup recipe from a Polish restaurant, Babuska’s Kitchen.  The recipe included directions for home-made noodles – something I had never done before – and seasonings for the soup such as fennel seed and garlic, neither of which I typically use.  It was a super-soup recipe, which I recently made for dinner on a blustery rainy Friday night – to be capped off with more comfort food:  chocolate-chip cookies.

For the major CC cookie genres, the review – and the recipe

The Ultimate Thick Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie: Your Quest for Perfection Ends Here with this Recipe

The cookie above left is smooth, while the other had the jagged-edge technique.

What can be more satisfying than finding what you were seeking for years? The perfect chocolate chip cookie can be elusive, despite its simplicity and iconic status.

I found that the traditional Toll House Cookie recipe (on the back of the chocolate chip package of the same name) yields serviceable cookies but did not produce the thicker, chewy toothsome variety, which I prefer.  I am not even considering the time my mother used baking powder instead of baking soda in the Toll House  recipe she made – under duress, for a school bake sale – resulting in rock-hard disks, which may have been over-baked, as well.   (To avoid being accused of being an ungrateful son, just past Mother’s Day, my mother frequently has told this story, without my prompting….)

Over the years, I occasionally would discover a bakery or home baker who created the ideal cookie:  one that has a minimally crisp circumference, contrasted by a soft, chewy pliable interior, yet filled with more-than-enough chocolate chips and the nutty counterpart of pecans or walnuts.  The nut-component truly is optional, but I will dare to take a stand and declare that I am 100% pro-nut.   However, I never did find a recipe to produce the ideal treat.  I even bought a cookbook nearly 25 years ago – and still have it – entitled enticingly, The Search for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie. This book promised to reveal the paragon of chocolate-chip-iness, yet none had the exact texture I craved.  Many of the award-winning recipes are good, and there were some interesting variants on the classic…just not “The One”.

Crisp perimeter with a satisfyingly chewy thick interior