The Chocolate Chip Cookie Project: Part V

Subject #5: The New York Times chocolate chip cookies

I finally did it! I made the New York Times cookies. Or Jaques Torres cookies, or whatever else you want to call them. Here’s how it went down.

The chocolate: Bars of baking chocolate I bought in Brussels. They’re not exactly top-quality (it’s the house rand of Delhaize, which is a supermarket chain), but still– Belgian chocolate! It must be a litle bit special, right? And the corner of the package declares “Belgian chocolate” (in English) and then “pure cocoa butter” (in French, Dutch and German). Instead of going for uniform chunks when I chopped the bars, I tried to to chop it into longer sticks, hoping it would simulate the layered-chocolate effect had by using the feves or discs recommended by the recipe.

Like Orangette, I used only all-purpose flour instead of the combination of cake and bread flours. I also halved the recipe, since I didn’t have the massive amount of chocolate a full recipe requires on hand. After preparing the dough on Tuesday night, it sat in the fridge until Thursday evening– about 44 hours. After allowing it to soften ever so slightly, I scooped out amounts that were smaller than the recommended 1/3 cup, since I didn’t want such massive cookies. I used a 1/4 cup and didn’t quite fill it all the way, so each cookies was about 1/5 a cup of dough.

Cookies topped with a sprinkling of sea salt, awaiting the oven

The recipe states 15-20 minutes, but mine were looking quite golden brown after only 11 minutes, so I removed them from the oven– I DID NOT want to overbake these babies.

The cookies were beautiful. A lovely craggy golden brown with streaks of chocolate throughout, like bakery cookies that immediately invoke cravings upon visual contact. Despite the shortened baking time, they were perfectly baked, still soft and dense in the middle, but not doughy. And the flavor was truly wonderful. A slight molasses flavor, with the sprinkled sea salt providing a pleasant contrast, distinct but not distracting. I just feel like they taste the way that chocolate chip cookies are supposed to taste, and I was so amazed that I made them. Some of the chocolate pieces were quite large, so occasionally a bite would be almost all chocolate and no cookie, but I still liked the effect of the longer pieces and will attempt to chop chocolate like that in the future, when appropriate.

So the moral of the story is bake these cookies. And if you want to read more about them, you can check out some of the bajillion other people who have blogged about these cookies.

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