Is this the best chocolate chip cookie?

Can King Arthur Baking's Recipe of the Year live up to the hype?

I think of myself as the Queen of Chocolate Chip Cookies. I’ve developed dozens of new recipes. My ever-growing recipe collection runs the gamut: there’s a crisp, gooey Irish cream version, a happy pink strawberry chocolate chip cookie and a monster of a dark chocolate, white chocolate, milk chocolate, super chocolate chip cookie, plus all manner of different textures from crun-chewy to thin and crisp. My test for any bakery is the quality of their chocolate chip cookie. I even own a signed copy of Ruth Wakefield’s Toll House Inn cookbook, in which the first recipe for the eponymous cookies appears. Golly, I’d dream of chocolate chip cookies, if my brain didn’t prefer to provide me with horrible anxiety dreams, none of which involve cookies or chocolate.

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So when King Arthur Baking Company declared to the world at the end of December 2023 that they had developed a new chocolate chip cookie recipe and it was their 2024 recipe of the year, oh, you bet I was intrigued. So, I put my expertise as a recipe developer and my years as a restaurant reviewer I decided to put their Supersized, Super-Soft Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe to the test.

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It is the ultimate chocolate chip cookie, in that all the attributes of a chocolate chip cookie are heightened. First, the butter is browned which brings a caramel nuttiness. While still hot, the butter is then poured over the brown sugar, to enhance the toffee flavor and, as you might remember from some of my cookie recipes, melted butter makes for a fudgy cookie. Instead of common chocolate chips, which would be like using cheap gin in a martini, chopped dark chocolate wafers (or in my case one of Trader Joe’s one-pound bars) melt into rich pools as the cookies bake. Bread flour, which has more protein than the standard all-purpose flour, is used to ensure a chewy cookie.

The most unexpected addition is tangzhong, a technique for cooking milk and flour together to form a thin paste, that is widely used across Asia to add tenderness to bread and prolong shelf life. Tangzhong is what makes Japanese milk bread so pillowy. (I also made King Arthur’s recipe for Japanese milk bread this week and it’s first rate.) Using tangzhong in cookies is a stroke of genius.

There are a few minor cons:

The dough needs to rest for at least 24 hours before baking. I was pretty proud of myself for waiting at least 6 hours to bake off some test cookies, but I made cookies from the dough one and two days later. Allowing the dough to rest develops the flavor and hydrates the flour. The result is a winning cookie that had my greedy little testers demanding more. For the truly desperate among us, King Arthur explains how to turn them into bar cookies.

The extra steps of browning the butter and making a tangzhong aren’t difficult, but it certainly adds a layer of complexity and extra time to what is usually a straightforward process. Is it worth it? All of my testers agreed they were outstandingly delicious cookies.

These are cookies that deserve to be discussed as a sommelier might (Cookie sommelier should be my next career. Let me know if you’re hiring). Notes of toasted caramel waft from the freshly baked cookie. Bursts of fruity, earthy dark chocolate break through the butteriness, and reset your palate to allow you to fully appreciate the next intense bite. The cookie miraculously manages to please everyone with all its textures: chewy, crunchy, fudgy and tender. Toffee notes linger on the palate.

Will I make these cookies again? Yup. These are special and definitely worth trying. From a purely technique standpoint they are a fun diversion from the usual “cream the butter and the sugar…” style of cookie making.

For those who’ve never made a tangzhong, or are hesitant to embark upon a new method when there’s a perfectly good recipe on the back of the yellow Nestle’s package, King Arthur’s directions are clear, reliable and worth the extra steps.

I am a big (unpaid) fan of all things King Arthur Baking. Their recipes are well-crafted, well-tested and in general, the folks up there in Norwich, Vermont seem like the type of people that’d be fun to hang out with.

You can find the recipe here.

If you make the cookies, let me know what you think.

In other news, we’ve had two snow days this past week. I’m one of those crazies that loves everything about snow. I don’t even mind shoveling or the piles of drying socks and outerwear that have taken over my dining room. Also, with a kid who’s a senior in high school, I may be a tad sentimental about having him home on a snow day. Nothing beats the joy of a kid (even a teenager) finding out it’s a snow day.

That said, no one likes the snow more than this guy:

He rolls in the snow, eats the snow and dozes on the snow in 16 degree temperatures.

And what are you lovelies up to this week? Please let me know in the comments.

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