I credit my Grandma Clark with feeding my love for these delectable treats. She makes good chocolate chip cookies and always has them on hand, which is a sign of a great grandma! And she's the one who taught me some tricks of the trade, like adding oats to the dough, and freezing already-made cookies which become nice and soft when they begin to thaw. So I owe a special thanks to Grandma for helping me in my search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
After many attempts and alterations of recipes, I've discovered that the best recipe in the world is the one on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip bag. Seriously. When people ask what recipe I use and I say Nestle, they balk at me. "Surely not!" they say. Everyone's tried that recipe a hundred times and the cookies come out flat and/or crispy and/or simply not perfect. But it's true. That's the recipe I use...with a few interpretations along the way.
Here are my main recommendations for baking the perfect chocolate chip cookies:
1) Do not use a mixer. Mixing by hand is important.
2) Pull butter straight out of the fridge and only slightly soften it.
3) Add approximately 1/2 Cup of oats to the dough.
So, here's a step-by-step of what I do (with less-than-ideal pictures since I baked this batch at night and there wasn't any natural light available):
Start with the wet ingredients. (Note that the brown sugar available here in Kenya is the dark molasses kind, so my cookies here always look darker than usual.)
Mix all the wet ingredients together. The butter should be in thick clumps, since it's pulled straight out of the fridge and only put in the microwave for 10-15 seconds to soften. The butter won't be completely mixed in until you add the dry ingredients. It takes a long time to mix the butter all the way.
Add the dry ingredients and slowly mix everything together. It should be hard to mix it by hand because the butter is so firm still. I often give my arm a break at some point because it definitely hurts my arm/hand/wrist to mix it this way.
The dough should be thick and sticky. Thick dough is a huge reason the cookies end up with the texture I like best.
See that streak of butter in the dough? That's a good sign that the butter wasn't too soft when I started. It's normal to find chunks of butter that still need to be mixed in even when the dough seems like it should be done.
When the butter is finally completely mixed in, add about 1/2 Cup of oats. That's an approximation because I tend to dump in whatever looks good - just enough to add more texture to the cookies but not so much to make them oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.
Finally, add those beautiful chocolate chips! Use at least a whole bag of chips. The Nestle recipe actually calls for more than a whole bag, which I highly agree with, but here in Kenya where chocolate chips are nowhere to be found except in Nairobi at $7/bag, I stick with just one bag of chips per batch of cookies. (The missionaries here always pack chocolate chips in their luggage when coming this way because they're either nonexistent or just too expensive to buy here.)
When the dough is done, it should look like this. Thick and sticky.
Then spoon them onto a cookie sheet and use your fingers to give them a general ball-shaped figure. Do not flatten them. They'll bake in the middle just the way they're meant to.
Mmmmmm.....
Pop them in the oven at 375 for 8-10 minutes and voila! I always check them at 8 minutes and keep checking them every 30 seconds or so after that in order to pull them out at just the right time. Cookies tend to bake really fast at the end and it's always a bummer to overbake them. And every oven is different so you need to know your oven!
They should look soft and a bit doughy. They'll keep baking for a bit on the hot cookie sheet even after they're pulled out of the oven.
This is my perfect chocolate chip cookie. Full of chips, lumpy texture, and the slightest bit doughy underneath. Mmmmm......
Oh, and I'll often make half the dough into balls and put 'em in the freezer. Because frozen cookie dough is one of life's greatest pleasures!
So there you have it. For everyone who's asked me, that's my secret. Baking chocolate chip cookies has become a coping mechanism for me here in Kenya. I've never baked them more frequently than I have here, which is ironic since chocolate chips are like gold around here because they're so hard to come by. But other missionaries and short-term visitors have been very gracious and given me chocolate chips many times. They know it's one of my things, and they know I'll share cookies if they share their chocolate chips :) So it's a good deal. And I haven't lost any more of the baby weight I was still trying to lose before we moved here, but at least I have a way to cope with some of the stress of living in a developing country!
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