Ingredients: 2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt, 2 sticks butter (unsalted, preferably), 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup dark brown sugar, 2 teaspoons real vanilla extract, 1 egg and 1 egg white, and 2 cups chocolate chunks:
I've definitely had more bad chocolate chip cookies than good ones. Especially vile are those soft tasteless pillows accented with waxy chocolate lumps that people try to pawn off in the office break room. I blame the Toll House recipe (too much flour, not enough butter), plus the lazy idea that all cookies are worth eating. Remember, we are baking here, not cooking - so discipline is important. That's where Martha Stewart comes in, and you best believe that's a 'good thing.' Say what you want about everyone's second-favorite celebrity inmate (Paris Hilton is now the top rank) - her baking recipes work. You just gotta follow the directions, lest you get shivved. This one is from her Baking Handbook. Before we get started, preheat your oven to 375.
Here we go - 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar and two sticks of butter that you left out on the counter to soften up. The first step of this recipe is the most crucial - we are creaming these, not mixing them. As usual the Kitchen Aid stand mixer is your MVP, but if you haven't got one of those, try your best with a hand held. Immersion mixers won't cut it at all, so you'll have to do it by hand. Get a whisk and beat the ingredients like a jail-house snitch, or until it looks like this:
Now that's smooth - no lumps, no grains of sugar. It's time to add one large egg, one egg white, and two teaspoons of vanilla. Here's the second most important part of this recipe - don't use that generic supermarket vanilla. Although artificial vanilla has some nostalgic value, the fact is you have to get the real - try Penzey's. Start up your mixer again or switch to your good arm and mix till smooth. In a separate bowl, toss in two cups of flour 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1 teaspoon baking soda. Whisk that together and add half to your wet ingredients, combine, then add the other half and combine again. Now, dig in! Or, at least wait until you add a cup of chopped hazelnuts:
Don't even think about putting these guys in a food processor - we want chunks, not dust. Just whack them with your big chef's knife a few times. Now use the same knife to chop up some baking chocolate. The chocolate is your call - use bittersweet, milk, whatever - just make sure it's good quality and use a lot - like two cups. Mix those in until combined.
Now, if you do everything right, the question people are gonna ask is "Daaaamn... how'd you get them so crispy?" That's what we are working for. The answer to the question is "I used a Silpat." Silpat is a brand name for a sheet of silicone with a fiberglass weave inside; World Cuisine also makes one. Martha says to line your baking sheets with chef's parchment (kind of a cross between waxed paper and butcher paper), but I have conducted side by side tests and the Silpat always wins. If you must, I suppose you can get by with greasing your sheets with a little butter, but at the very minimum you should have a roll of chef's parchment in the kitchen - it's handy. Either way, dollop out your dough onto the baking sheets in the above manner. Actually, give them more room so they don't get friendly like this:
Bake for 18 minutes, and rotate the sheets halfway through. Yes, you have to do this, otherwise you will get some burned and some raw instead of nicely browned all over. Take the silpat off the pan (with the cookies still on it) and set that somewhere to cool for a few minutes before you use a spatula to transfer the cookies to a wire rack.
When they are completely cool, you can store these babies in an ordinary Tupperware container and they will stay crispy for four days. If you need to keep them longer, put that same Tupperware container in the freezer - just make sure to thaw the cookies in the UNOPENED Tupperware for an hour before you eat them. You don't want to give your prison wife a limp cookie, after all...
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