Harriett’s Awesome Chocolate Chip Cookies

These are the chocolate chip cookies that my corporate food court customers would actually come in to work for. A good number of company employees told me, "I could have worked from home but I remembered that you are here on Tuesdays and I have to get these cookies for my family or they would kill me!" Far be it from me to cause dissension in any household! So, what makes these chocolate chip cookies so awesome? The browned butter that adds a caramel-y flavor to the base cookie dough for these lovies. Most browned butter instructions tell you to only let the butter get to a light caramel color. I'm telling you, I like to scrape the dark fond out of the bottom of my pan! For this cookie dough I let the butter get to a deep chocolate brown -- not burned, but a dark chocolate.  (See my separate instructions for browned butter elsewhere in this blog.) Now, on with the Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe itself. I like to keep a variety of chocolate bars and chocolate chips in my pantry so I can mix them up to suit my taste at the time. Sometimes a simply dark chocolate chip cookie, that less-sweet full-bodied mouthful of flavor, is what I need after a complicated day. Sometimes I mix dark with semisweet chips for a little more interest. Total semi-sweet chocolate chip cookies are the classic flavor and a go-to for the kid in me. So when you are assembling the chocolate chips for your cookie dough, make sure you get the highest quality chocolate that you can. Of course these Chocolate Chip Cookies will taste great made with everyday chocolate chips. You'll get compliments and be very gratified. But to really take them over the top you'll need just a little more effort (and a just bit more cost). First of all, don't feel married to the regular sized chocolate chips that come in a bag. For a really great looking (and tasting) chocolate chip cookie go for the solid chocolate bars. Yes, you'll have to use a good sharp chef's knife to chop it up into small pieces. And don't throw away those shavings once you've chopped up what you need! The shavings go into your dough to make those glorious smears of chocolate that are so appealing to the eye. The uneven pieces that you end up using melt inside the cookie and give you appreciable chunks of chocolate flavor mixed with smaller bursts of chocolate throughout. Secondly, pay attention to the temperature of your butter. Don't leave it out so long that it loses its shape on the counter. Your butter is softened just right when you can poke it and your finger barely leaves a dent. You'll know that you got the temperature right if your scoop of cookie dough has crevices at the top of the raw scoop (see picture). Thirdly, and this is important for pretty much all cookie doughs, remember that you want cookies with a delicate crunch, not tough. As with pie crusts, the water in butter and the moisture in eggs will interact with the flour in cookie dough to develop gluten. And gluten is great for bread -- not cookies. Once you add the flour for cookie dough try to keep handling to a minimum. After the flour and basic dough ingredients have been well combined fold in the additions with as little fuss as you can. The result will be much more tender cookies. So don't over handle your cookie dough. Are you ready to make these Awesome Chocolate Chip Cookies?! Let's go!