Chocolate Chip Cookies: The Best I’ve Ever Made

This recipe is modeled after Jacques Torres’ Secret Chocolate Chip Cookies. I bake a lot, and I’m pretty good at it – but even in that light, these cookies are so spectacular, that I can’t believe that I can make them.

Ingredients to produce 23 cookies, 3¾” diameter

1½ cups + 1 Tbs pastry flour
1 cups + 1 Tbs bread flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1½ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 lb. unsalted butter (2 sticks)
1 cup (packed) brown sugar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 lb. semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

How to do it:

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Maybe. See Step 5.
  2. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, stir together flours, baking powder, and baking soda until well blended, about 30 seconds on lowest speed. Transfer to a mixing bowl.

The wheat flour makes the cookie chewier and a bit more substantial, while it also counterbalances the insane amount of chocolate.

  1. Add butter and sugars to the mixer, and cream until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes on speed 6 (of 10). Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well and scraping down the bowl after each addition. Reduce speed to low and add vanilla.

If you’re in a hurry and you’re taking the butter right out of the fridge, there are many ways to hurry up the softening process. I suggest this: place 3/4 of the butter in the mixing bowl, and start creaming it. Meanwhile, place the remaining 1/4 of the butter in the microwave, and nuke it until it’s mostly melted. Add that to the mixing bowl and continue creaming. Once the melted and cold butter are fully blended, proceed with next steps.

  1. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and stir just until incorporated, about 1 minute on lowest speed. Add chocolate; mix just long enough so that it’s well distributed.

This is an obscene amount of chocolate, but it makes a terrific cookie. You could do with less. If you have odd bits of different kinds of chocolate, try mixing them or dividing the batter and making small batches with each type. If you have chocolate candy bars around, they work nicely, too. Note though that some candy bar ingredients, like caramel, will melt and spread in a way that you might not like. Chocolate nut bars work perfectly.

  1. Store the dough, tightly wrapped, in the refrigerator for anywhere from 2 hours to 3 days.

You can skip this, but I suggest you don’t. Doing it produces a much prettier cookie with a much more interesting texture. It’s the secret to this recipe.

  1. Using a 1/4-cup scoop, plop the cookie dough onto baking sheets, spacing the cookies about 2 inches apart. Bake until medium-brown, about 18 minutes. Wait until the baking sheet has cooled to the point that it’s pleasant to the touch before removing the cookies.

I line my baking sheets with 11”x17” Silpats. I can fit eight cookies on each Silpat. Once the cookie sheet has cooled to the point that it’s merely warm to the touch and can be handled easily, I remove the cookies from the Silpat by hand – no spatula necessary.

You want the cookies to be solidly browned – darker than you might guess. You’ll think that you’ve eliminated any chance of them being chewy, but you’ll find that you haven’t.

  1. Continue cooling the cookies on wire racks. Once they’re nearly room temperature but still just barely warm, eat or serve them. Allow the cookies to come to stone-cold room temperature before stacking and storing them.

Notes:

Splurge on the chocolate. It’s worth it in this case. Two pounds of Callebaut might have a shocking price tag, in which case a full batch of these chocolate chip cookies might be rather expensive to produce, and the chocolate might represent 70% of your cost. But it will also create at least 70%-worth of the experience. These cookies are meant to be extraordinary; splurge.

Do not use chocolate chips. To a large degree, the texture is what makes this cookie so successful, and that texture depends on coarsely chopped chocolate. Chopped chocolate discs work, but common chocolate chips do not, even if you chop them.

You should “chopthe chocolate by see-sawing your way through it with a serrated knife. To get a coarse chop, try for something in between a 1/8″ and 1/4″ slices. You’ll actually be making a horrifying crumbly mess, but believe it or not, that’s perfect. Once you’re done, single out any particularly large pieces and chop them down to match the average size of the other chunks. Your chunks will wind up being more like rectangles than they are like spheres and that is what makes them different from chocolate chips. These rectangles are going to produce a cookie with chocolate striations. That is a critical difference between these and the rest of the world’s chocolate chip cookies.

Chopping chocolate in the manner I’ve just described will produce a significant amount of chocolatedust” or “crumbs.” This dust will work itself into the dough so that the cookies will be studded with tiny particles of chocolate. This is another factor that sets this cookie apart. That said, don’t deliberately try to produce dust. You don’t want any more than you have to have.

Don’t bake these cookies in a convection oven. The chocolate will melt, creating sticky cookie bottoms, and the cookies will spread too far.

Chocolate Chip Cookies: The Best I’ve Ever Made

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! Thank you, Kesor. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. Jacques Torres did not promise me baked goods for life in exchange for this post, nor did he threaten to sue me if I didn’t take it down. 

Keep up with us on Bloglovin’

Large Blog Image

Chicken with Balsamic Figs and Roasted Potato Wedges
Vegetable Bacon Soup

76 thoughts on “Chocolate Chip Cookies: The Best I’ve Ever Made

  1. I believe that avoiding high-fat foods, white flour, and white sugar is the first step to losing weight. Those foods can taste good, but they have very little comparative nutritional value, and you wind up eating many more calories than you need to get through the day. If you are constantly eating these foods, transitioning to whole grains and other complex carbohydrates will help you to have more energy, while taking in fewer calories. Thanks a lot 🙂 for your blog post.

    • Thanks a lot for thanking me for a post that is obviously the antithesis of your philosophy on eating.

      I’m no nutritionist; nutrition is never what I post about, except in a very general way or perhaps as a stray comment. If you were to survey my site, you wouldn’t be able to produce a picture of my daily diet, which includes a high proportion of raw fruits and vegetables, a variety of proteins, and relies heavily on unprocessed foods. I don’t post about those foods because, since I’m not discussing nutrition, there’s not much new or interesting that can I tell you about the apple I ate today.

      I wish I had been born in ancient Roman times, because to me, eating is, like most of life, a balance between countless factors: nutrition, pleasure, health, wealth, availability, etc. To Romans, virtue was a matter of having opposing things in balance. In our culture, it seems that virtue is about extremism, fanaticism, and uncompromising blind faith. In the end, people are what they are: there are those who live via compromise and those who live by fundamentalism, and there are those who hide behind them.

  2. Well, they’re certainly pretty cookies! I’m intrigued by the flours. I love chopped chocolate, and indeed it’s worth splurging on good chocolate.
    Mimi recently posted…Tuscan Pot Roast

  3. I’ve always been a Jacques Torres fan. Years ago I ran the cooking school at Sur La Table in Santa Monica, and he came to teach a class and do a book signing. He was a class act. My favorite part of his visit was that on the way from the airport, he asked our program director to stop ant In-N-Out. How great is that!? Okay, onto the recipe . . . I love these cookies! Looks like yours turned out perfectly. I could eat more than a dozen in a sitting. Thanks for reminding me about the cookies, Jacques, and when I met him. 🙂 ~Valentina

  4. Wonderful answer and Im agree with you ! I cook and bake only for love and for these who love how I cook.
    My daugther is vegan and is not
    Easy sometimes .
    And of course I love these cookies.

  5. Oh, I love that Jacques Torres cookie recipe! Lots of excellent chocolate and leaving the dough to rest before you bake it are key. Your cookies look fantastic!

  6. YESSSSSSS!!! First, I am intrigued by your use of bread flour in the dough! I never would have thought to do that, and I can totally see how that would make for an amazing cookie. And I am so with you on refrigerating that cookie dough, as well as taking the time (and spending the money) on good chocolate and chopping it yourself. (I’ll have to try Callebut! I love Belgium chocolate, but haven’t tried this brand yet!) Absolutely cannot wait to try your recipe Jeff, I’m craving these cookies as I write!
    Shannon recently posted…Chiffon Cakes with Chocolate Chunks

  7. As a chocoholic, these cookies are definitely right up my alley! Now I have to admit I’ve never actually made a cookie from scratch (unless you count biscotti, but they are really different thing). May be time to give it go… I have to say, though, from experience with bread making that your suggestion to add a bit of wheat flour is a really good one. It really does add a chewiness and a certain depth of flavor, without necessarily giving the product that “whole wheat” taste.
    Frank Fariello recently posted…Scrippelle ‘mbusse (Crepes in Broth)

    • You hit the nail right on the head, Frank. They’re not Wheat cookies. They just have an interesting depth of flavor and texture. But enough about that. You’ve never made a cookie? That’s interesting!

  8. A great cookie recipe and one I’ll be giving a try. I started chopping high-quality chocolate for my cookies after moving here as we don’t get American type chocolate chips. But, to my pleasure, I learned how much better a cookie is with chopped 60% Swedish chocolate. I love the three different flours, I’ve not tried that, but will soon.
    Ron recently posted…An update and “Löjrom, råraka, rödlök, & crème fraiche”…                                      

    • The cake and bread flours were Jacques’ idea. I added the wheat. I really like the result.

  9. Bread flour in a cookie recipe? Well, by golly, now I’ve seen it all. Seriously, though, if you say these are the best cookies you’ve ever baked, then you have my attention! I know you are an accomplished baker, so that carries some weight here. Also, I think you should start a business selling chocolate dust. Also (part two), I often confuse Jacques Torres with Jacques Cousteau. Too many Jacqueses.
    David @ Spiced recently posted…Chocolate Caramel Shortbread Cookies

  10. I love Jacques Torres’ recipe. The aging of the dough is positively magical! And this recipe intrigues me because it also includes whole wheat flour! I imagine it adds a nice flavor note, too! I totally agree on the chocolate, too – the best chocolate, chopped thin! Delicious recipe!
    Laura recently posted…Chocolate Bread Pudding

  11. I’m not much of a baker, so I usually use simple recipes. This recipe looks amazing and your description has sold me. I’ll be saving this to give it a try!

  12. This sounds like a new approach- making Chocolate Chip Cookies using coarsely chopped chocolate instead of chips! I have a huge bag of Callebaut milk chocolate I could use, but probably smi-sweet would be better. Am printing this recipe off so I can make these and getting my ‘stretchy pants’ ready!

    • You’ll need those stretchy pant! I love milk chocolate in cookies like this, by the way. Maybe a bit sweet.

  13. Jeff, until this post, I have rarely been inspired to make chocolate chip cookies. Everyone says theirs is the best but you have actually explained why, and — more important — how yours are! From the ingredients — the combination of the three flours and the importance of the right chocolate (yes, good chocolate is worth every penny) to name a few — to the well written and detailed instructions, I am going to get the ingredients and make these this week. The chocolate will be the biggest hurdle, as I know Callebaut (nor Valrhona) is not available in Tucson. Finally, the thread that the no-sugar/no-fun person started is a hoot. I would have taken that for spam! Good on your for answering. Happy cooking this week!
    David Scott Allen recently posted…Begging Your Forgiveness.

    • Thanks, David. Not my recipe – Jacques is an amazing chef. I will take credit for the wheat flour, though. No Callebaut or Valrhona in Tucson?!?!

    • I love Lindt chocolate, and because it’s in bar form, it will work beautifully in these cookies.

  14. These are my husband’s favorite chocolate chip cookies! I think partially because I make them with 1/4 cup of cookie dough, but they’re also darn tasty! Glad you enjoy them, too!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*
*
Website

CommentLuv badge