Chocolate chunk cookie recipe | Cookie troubleshooting

This recipe uses chocolate chunks from a bar of recipe and brown butter to make a crumbly, nutty version of the classic chocolate chip cookie!

There’s biscuits and then there’s cookies – a flat, palm sized round from heaven which is crispy at the edges and chewy like a brownie in the centre, best enjoyed warm from the oven. Sugar and butter cannot find a better vehicle. In India, we’re more familiar with biscuits – the packaged variety, which also comes in round shapes, but are very different from cookies usually found in modern bakeries. A cookie looks very simple to make – you make a dough out of sugar, butter, flour, eggs and your mix-ins (like a cake batter but with less liquid and more sugar+butter) and there are endless ideas and recipes to try…..but never have I encountered a more moody item.

There’s tons of technical errors that can ruin a good cookie due to factors seemingly out of your control, which is why cookies are a rare treat from my kitchen. However, every once in a while, a cookie takes the internet by storm and then I really want to try it, like: Christina Tosi’s Compost cookie from Milkbar which received rave reviews, Alison Roman’s sensational Salted Chocolate Chunk Shortbread cookie and Chris Morocco’s Chocolate chip cookie (which I tried to adapt here).

My primary struggle with adapting any cookie recipe has always been the amount of flour. The first time I attempted a cookie recipe, all 8 of the dough balls melted into a single sheet of crunchiness which resembled a parmesan crisp more than any cookie. Somehow, I’ve always needed 2 cups where the recipe called for only 1/2 or 3/4 cup, because the dough didn’t hold together. This yields a doughy/cakey cookie with a very mild flavour unless I add more sugar and mix-ins. I’m still struggling to get the amount of flour in cookie dough right, but here’s what I’ve learnt (listed for convenience):

Lessons learned the hard way:

1. The temperature and humidity of your location is actually a crucial factor. Most cookie recipes begin with creaming softened butter and sugar together, but it can be so warm in your city that your ingredients may melt while forming the dough. Not only do they fail to add firmness (like dry ingredients do), they turn your dough into a wet, sticky batter. Keep pausing and chilling in the fridge if you suspect this happening.
2. The water content in butter and flour is different across the world. There’s more in the South Asian region.
3. Eggs used commonly in India (the table tray kind) are of a medium to large size, which means the quantity of egg white is also large. Egg whites behave similar to water in a cookie. Hence, if a cookie recipe calls for more than 1 egg, you might want to consider just using the yolks.
4. Cookie dough is not forgiving. Adjusting the dough by continuously adding more liquid/sugar/flour to it affects the texture of the cookie by making it tough or dense due to gluten development. Once you add in flour to your dough, you should only mix it till everything is incorporated and not continue beating/kneading it.
5. If you’re in a hot, tropical location, you definitely need to chill your cookies for at least 30 mins in the fridge (or 15 mins in the freezer) so that it is malleable, before baking.
6. It’s generally a good idea to bake 1 test cookie (even if it takes you 10-12 mins extra) before you bake a sheet of it. That way, you’ll know best how much your cookies will spread: if your dough needs more chilling (else it will melt into a puddle) /whether the dough should be rolled into balls or flattened into discs before baking + how it tastes.
7. Don’t cool your cookies inside the oven, as it will bake further and even burn. Take them outside the oven. They require 20 minutes of cooling at room temperature to harden.

Coming to chocolate chip cookies, I’ve noticed that brown butter and sea salt (2 ingredients which have surged in popularity in Western cooking) feature in several popular cookie recipes as well, and I wanted to try the difference myself. Brown butter (clarified butter/ghee) has a nutty, caramelly fragrance, not unlike the Nutties chocolates that used to everywhere a decade ago. You can’t substitute ghee for it though, they have different aftertastes. The sea salt added to the cookie after its baked adds a nice balance of sweet saltiness. As for the sugars: white sugar adds crunchiness while brown sugar adds a molasses flavour and chewiness. A good amount of brown sugar is a prerequisite to any chocolate chip recipe, else it’ll just be a pale sugar cookie. I’ve used both raw cane sugar and demerara sugar, though I prefer the former for its taste. Brown sugar does not add much sweetness, so both kinds of sugars are desired.
To my great delight, I’ve also observed that chocolate chunks are rapidly replacing chocolate chips (those cone shaped chocolate drops that look like Hershey’s kisses). Chocolate chips, albeit traditional and cute-looking, are expensive for their weight and the ones I’ve come across have been oily, with little taste of chocolate. Chocolate bars/compounds are sourced easily and can be cut into chunks of desirable sizes (I prefer mine uneven), and who doesn’t like biting into a nice puddle of warm gooey chocolate? That being said, make sure they’re not on top of the cookie dough ball while baking, else they’ll burn and lend an acrid smell and taste to your cookie.

Cookies are good for 3 days, but a jar of good old homemade chocolate chunk cookies are always polished off the same day.

Makes 12 cookies
Time: 1 hour (including 30 minutes of chilling)
RECIPE

Ingredients:
Flour, 1 cup
White sugar, 1/2 cup powdered
Brown sugar, 1/3 cup powdered
Egg, 1 large
Butter, 80g divided into 2
Salt, 1/2 tsp
Vanilla extract, 1 tsp
Chocolate, chopped into chunks or chocolate chips (150g)

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 190°C or 375°F. Cover your baking tray with parchment paper or foil.
2. To make the brown butter, melt 40g of butter in a saucepan over medium heat for 2-3 minutes, stirring it with a spatula often to make sure that the milk solids do not burn at the bottom. The butter will foam and turn brown, and there will be a residue of dark brown milk solids at the bottom. Turn off the heat and let it cool completely.
3. Mix the remaining butter into the melted butter.
4. Add the sugars to the butter and cream it together till there are no lumps, and it looks smooth.
5. Add the egg, salt and vanilla extract, and whisk well.
6. Fold in the flour, and finally the chocolate chunks.
7. Chill the dough in the fridge for 30 mins.
8. To form it into balls, use an ice cream scooper or large round spoon.
9. A nice tip to get a rugged top where the chunks stand out is to break a large ball into two, and use the craggy inside of the broken ball as the surface of the cookie.
10. Bake it for 12 minutes in the oven, until the edges are dark brown.
11. Cool for at least 20 minutes outside the oven.
    
    Enjoy!