Best/Worst Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever

I have always been an enormous fan of chocolate chip cookies. They were a weekly occurance at my house growing up. I have to stock up with bags and bags of chocolate chip when I visit the US so I can make the little angels- they don't sell chocolate chips here. So, a while ago I read a blog post from orangette which referred to this article in the NY Times. I suggest you read it for yourself. There was an extensive search for the world's best chocolate chip cookie recipe. They spoke to famous bakers around new york and accumulated the best tips to make this recipe. So of course, I had to try it. I was lukcy enough to aquire some of these chocolate disks (which the recipe recommends to get layers of chocolate) from my mom (thanks, mom!) so last week was the week.

The recipe doesn't call for much that is unusal. It calls for bread flour and cake flour, but those don't exactly exist here, so I used regular flour. And it said to cream the butter and sugar for 5 min in a stand mixer. I don't have a stand mixer, so I used my good ol' electric hand mixer for 5 min. And, I didn't have quite enough butter on hand, so I was a little short. So, I creamed the butter and sugar, added eggs one at a time, added vanlila, then the sifted flour, baking soda and salt, 'til just combined. The dough was really thick. Then it called for 20oz chocolate discs, next time I'd put just a little less. It sounded like a lot, and it was a lot. But it didn't make them taste bad. This was stage 1:

So the first trick/thing that makes these different, is that one should refrigerate the dough for at least 24hrs, 3 days is prefered. Apearantly because the moisture in them (butter) is not very liquid, it takes a long time for the flour to properly absorb the moisture. Well, I'm not asking questions, I just obeyed. So this sat in my fridge for 3 days. The second trick is to make the cookies big- dough ball about the size of a large golf ball. This gives the cookie dimension. The outer rim is crispy, the next inch is normal, and the inside is nice and soft and gooey. So, I put these huge balls of dough on my sheet, followed by the third trick, a little sea salt. I sprinkled just a touch of sea salt on top of the cookies, before they were baked. They baked for about 18min and looked like this:

So, why does the title of this post include "worst?" This made so much dough, I was constantly picking at the delicious dough for the 3 days it sat in the fidge. The yield said 6 cookies. Not quite. I made about 12 cookies, with a little dough left over to continue snacking on the dough. Keeping in mind that Johan isn't too big on sweets, one can conclude that I at so much cookie dough/so many cookies in the last week! I probably gained 5lbs. Don't get me wrong, these cookies were fabulous. I was so happy with them. I could have bought the anywhere and would be satisfied. The salt was an interesting contrast to the sweetness, I totally agree with the layers of chocolate the discs provide, and the 3 consistencies where delicious! Theses were amazing, and obviously worth the 5lbs I gained. But next time, I'll need to share a few more of them.