Week 4: The Chewy Recipe

There have been far too many real meals cooked around here. It's time for something fun, right?

Adapted from:
The Chewy Recipe
Alton Brown, for Food Network

Makes 2 1/2 dozen (or 2 dozen if you eat lots of dough) cookies



2 sticks unsalted butter
2 1/4 C flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 C sugar
1 1/4 C brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 Tbsp. milk
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 C semisweet chocolate chips

Heat oven to 375 degrees F. (In retrospect, I'd wait to do this. The dough has to chill later. That's the perfect time to preheat the oven.)

Melt the butter. (Yup. That's right. It says melt the butter. Weird, no?) Dump the flour, salt, and baking soda in a big bowl and stir around with a fork. Set aside.

Use a mixer to cream the butter and sugars on medium speed. Add the egg, yolk, milk and vanilla and mix until well combined. Slowly incorporate the flour mixture until thoroughly combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Chill the dough. (This is an important and easily overlooked step - I speak from experience.)

Scoop dough (the globs were about 1" round) onto parchment-lined baking sheets, 6 cookies per sheet. Bake for 14 minutes or until golden brown.

Cool completely and store in an airtight container.

Much to my dismay and despite lots of experimentation with the oven (two sheets at one time, one sheet at a time, moving oven racks, reducing cooking time to 12 minutes) the bottoms of every single batch burned. Alton would probably blame the gear - wrong brand of parchment paper or cookie sheets that didn't distribute the heat evenly. The non-burned part of the cookie was really tasty, though. I only tried them warm out of the oven - will see how they are on Day 2.

And, if chewy chocolate chip cookies aren't your thing, be sure to check out these recipes:
The Thin
The Puffy