The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie and Double Chocolate Chip Cookie

Another chocolate chip cookie recipe...From Jacques Tores' A Year In Chocolate... His recipe doesn't call for overnight-ting the cookies dough, but by all chef accounts, it's best to make dough 24h before baking them so it gives time for vanilla and other flavors to seep in. The cookbook says to bake cookies at 325F for 15 minutes...in my oven, it was closer to 25-30 minutes...

These make giant chocolate chip cookies--the type you get at Starbucks etc...  I slightly tweaked the recipe and my oven seems to have different cooking times...

Here's what I did in simplified format...  check out the cookbook if you want more text and prose

Obviously, preheat your oven before baking so if you make the cookies the day of, you could start preheating before making the dough...I've just stopped baking cookies the day I make the dough

Bowl 1 or in a ziploc bag, mix the following:
4 3/4 cups flour
2 tsp salt
1.5 tsp baking powder
1.5 baking soda

Bowl 2:
Step 1:
Beat butter and sugar together (book says 5 minutes assuming it's an electric mixer....I don't know own an electric mixer and make do...no one seems to complain)
3 sticks unsalted room-temperature butter
1.25 cups + 2.5 tablespoons sugar
2 cups brown sugar (FYI recipe said 2.25)

Step 2:
Add 3 large eggs (FYI recipe said they should be at room temperature, and already slightly beaten, which is consistent with most professional chefs' advice about needing eggs to be already beaten before adding it in, or else the sugar "cooks" the eggs...that said, I didn't have the motivation to do this step and use up another container so I tend to push the sugar butter to one side of the bowl, put in the eggs to the other half of the bowl, slightly beat them on the side, and then mix them into the sugar butter mix...all about the one bowl)

Step 3:
Beat in 2 teaspoons vanilla to the sugar butter egg mix

Step 4
Add in flour mixture a bit at a time...

Step 5:
Once flour is incorporated, fold in chocolate:

A note about chocolate: Torres recipe says to use 1 2/3 pounds bittersweet chocolate chopped into bite sized pieces...  I didn't have it on hand so instead, chopped up 7 Bakers chocolate semisweet squares and 1/2 a bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips (chopped both)...  No one complained about the lack of chocolate...

Step 6:
Place 3 inch cookie dough spheres 1 in from each other...
Another side note: I used a ruler.  Three inches looks abnormally huge...  They actually do spread and turn into those giant chocolate chip cookies at bakeries...crispy on the outside edges and soft in the middle



Last side note:
Interesting substitutions he suggests:
For more cakelike texture: replace 1 egg with 2 egg yolks
For chocolate chocolate chip cookies: replace 1c flour with dutch-processed cocoa pwder
For very moist cookies, replace 5.5 T of browns ugar and .5 granulated sugar with equal amount of light corn syrup