Note: this is the new version! đŞ
Ingredients
1 1/4 cups (10 ounces, 280 grams or 2 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups (240 grams) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (225 grams) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons (10 ml) vanilla extract
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse or kosher salt
3 1/2 cups plus 2 teaspoons (yes, really) (445 grams) all-purpose flour
1 1/4 pounds (565 grams) bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60%
Sea salt
With a hand or stand mixer, cream the butter and sugars together until light, fluffy and then some, about 3 to 4 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, and mix to combine. Add vanilla, mix, then scrape down bowl. Sprinkle baking soda, baking powder and salt over dough and mix it until fully combined. Add flour all at once and mix it in short bursts until it almost completely disappears, but no longer. You donât want to overmix it. Add chocolate pieces in and try to incorporate them without breaking them. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and chill in fridge for a minimum of 24 hours and up to 72 hours, although I have totally had it in there up to 5 days are weâre all just fine.
Heat oven to 350 degrees and line a couple large baking sheets with parchment paper or nonstick baking mats. Form dough into 3 1/2-ounce (100 gram) balls, which will seem completely absurd (theyâre larger than golf balls, closer to skeeballs) but donât fight it. If any chocolate pieces are right across the tops or sides of the balls of dough, try to bury them back in it. I find pockets of chocolate superior to exposed puddles of them. Arrange balls of dough very far apart on sheets (these cookies will be up to 5 inches wide once baked) and sprinkle the tops of each with a few flecks of sea salt.
Bake cookies for 12 to 17 minutes, until golden all over. This is a large range because I find that they range in how much they spread thus checking in at the early on on your first batch is safest.
Cool cookies on trays for 10 minutes, then transfer them to racks.
A bunch of notes: Revisiting this cookie required that I address a few issues I had with them the first time.
The weight of the bread flour [8.5 ounces for 1 2/3 cups, or 145 grams per cup] in the original recipe is incorrect. Bread flour fairly reliably clocks in at 120 to 125 grams per cup, so this should be 200 to 210 grams or 7 to 7.4 ounces. I donât think a lot of people cared because most people used the cup measurement but it likely would have led to a thicker and more dry cookie. This and other corrected weights below work just fine but I really believe this recipe was imagined for cups and spoons foremost.
The other big item many people questioned in the original recipe was the logic of enlisting a low-gluten (cake) and high-gluten (bread) flour, almost 1:1, instead of replacing them both with a medium-gluten flour (all-purpose). David Leite says that âThe combination creates a higher protein level than all-purpose flour, giving it a bit more tooth.â But I found the texture from all-purpose flour to be perfect, and will only use this from now on.
Being me, i.e. lazy and hating washing dishes, I got rid of that pesky two-bowl and sifting thing.
The biggest headache of this recipe is its particular insistence that you use Valrhona fèves, large, oval .125-ounce bittersweet chocolate discs of exquisite quality and extravagant price point, to make these cookies. As I make these rarely and theyâre almost always to spoil guests, I splurge on them. [This bag will cover you for 1 1/2 batches + a handful of luxurious snacking and is the best price Iâve found] However, other chocolate baking discs (larger and flatter than chips) work here too; a favorite of mine for baking are Guittardâs chocolate wafers [however, I used to get them for $10 to $11 per pound, and theyâre now the same price as the Valrhona link above soâŚ]
Finally, please keep in mind that this a cookie for chocolate fiends. Great pools of melted chocolate fill every bite; the dough, as my FIL joked, is little more than glue holding these puddles together. These Salted Chocolate Chunk Cookies are smaller and also riddled with chocolate, but less excessively so. These Crispy Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies are much closer to the Toll House original (but better in flavor, we think).