Chocolate Chip Cookies - Again

Before I moved out of my previous apartment, I tried out the David Leite recipe from The New York Times for chocolate chip cookies. It produced good results (seen here), and one of my friends absolutely raved about the tang of the salt on top of the cookie. Apparently, and I'm not sure how this happened, but he says I owe him a batch of these because he was laid off from his job. I don't know that I had heard about that rule.

So, whatever. No one has been making me cookies since I lost my job. I find I have to make them for myself if I want them. No wonder, then, that when a Serious Eats contributor posted her love for a version that David Lebovitz had created, it caught my eye.

I'm still mostly partial to the old Toll House standby, and I have to say that the younger of my two brothers makes a mean version of that cookie. He's created a recipe whereby he fiddles around with the amount of flour that he uses to get just the right crispy-chewy ratio going. I have to say, as much as I'm good and baking other things, I think he gets the chocolate chip cookie crown hands down.

Still, I'm not opposed to trying at least to see if I can find a better way to make these. Here is the photo from the results. I found that these took at least five minutes longer to make than the instructions said. I'm also very partial to the toffee-like crispy brown edges so the extra time was definitely needed to produce that texture.

I did use pecans in this, which I might eliminate were I to make it again. The other thing that I might do is increase the amount of salt in them. As a substitute, I sprinkled a little sea salt on top of them before they baked. I found them originally to be kind of meh and bland - absolutely nothing to crave about them - so that extra touch helped in my opinion. Now, I just need to find someone (or someones) to eat all of these!

Buon appetito!

Kitchen Witch Tip

Remember the tip I posted about using the bread knife for cutting up nuts? Well, the same thing goes for chopping up blocks of chocolate as well. I prefer to buy chocolate bars for these cookie recipes to get some variety in the chunks. A bread knife is very useful in breaking up the bars into small chip-sized pieces.