When I made Alice Medrich's Goldies recipe in Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy, I couldn't help also noticing the recipe in the cookbook immediately following. Medrich's recipe for "Ultrathin Chocolate Chunk Cookies" includes a full-page photo (the same photo that appears here on the Serious Eats website) showing a lone chocolate chip cookie propped up on its edge. The cookie is so thin -- practically lacy -- that it is semi-translucent. Medrich promises that the cookies "shatter dramatically when you bite them, releasing loads of caramel brown sugar flavor and bursts of bittersweet chocolate."
To make the batter, you combine cooled melted butter, oats, sugar, dark brown sugar, corn syrup, whole milk, and salt; add flour and baking soda; and stir in chocolate chips or chunks (I used chips). You need to rest the dough at room temperature for a few hours, or overnight in the fridge; I was pressed for time and waited exactly two hours before baking the dough. The recipe is written to make 15 huge cookies that are each five inches across. I wanted my cookies to be slightly smaller, so I used a #40 scoop to portion out the dough and ended up with 19 cookies instead. I flattened each cookie as much as possible before baking, but I couldn't get them flatter than the height of the chocolate chips in the dough. I also (perhaps foolishly) disregarded the recipe instructions to bake these cookies on a foil-lined pan and instead lined my pans with parchment.
The recipe instructs you to bake the cookies for 20-25 minutes or until they are very brown, admonishing that they will not be crisp if they are too pale. I checked my first pan of cookies after 20 minutes in the oven and they were burned and almost black. I baked the remaining cookies for 13 minutes.
As you can see from the picture above, my cookies looked nothing like the cookbook photo. They looked like ordinary chocolate chip cookies that happened to be a bit on the thin side. And they basically tasted like a standard Toll House chocolate chip cookie as well. They were crispy on the outside but very chewy on the inside. Biting into one of these cookies didn't shatter anything except my hopes of producing a super-crispy cookie.
All that said, these were good chocolate chip cookies and my tasters really enjoyed them. I am quite tempted to try this recipe again -- but if I do I will make a few changes, including allowing more time to rest the dough, using miniature chocolate chips so I can flatten the dough more before baking, and baking the cookies on foil instead of parchment. I want to bake a chocolate chip cookie that shatters!
Recipe: "Ultrathin Chocolate Chunk Cookies" from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy: Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich, recipe available here at Serious Eats.
To make the batter, you combine cooled melted butter, oats, sugar, dark brown sugar, corn syrup, whole milk, and salt; add flour and baking soda; and stir in chocolate chips or chunks (I used chips). You need to rest the dough at room temperature for a few hours, or overnight in the fridge; I was pressed for time and waited exactly two hours before baking the dough. The recipe is written to make 15 huge cookies that are each five inches across. I wanted my cookies to be slightly smaller, so I used a #40 scoop to portion out the dough and ended up with 19 cookies instead. I flattened each cookie as much as possible before baking, but I couldn't get them flatter than the height of the chocolate chips in the dough. I also (perhaps foolishly) disregarded the recipe instructions to bake these cookies on a foil-lined pan and instead lined my pans with parchment.
As you can see from the picture above, my cookies looked nothing like the cookbook photo. They looked like ordinary chocolate chip cookies that happened to be a bit on the thin side. And they basically tasted like a standard Toll House chocolate chip cookie as well. They were crispy on the outside but very chewy on the inside. Biting into one of these cookies didn't shatter anything except my hopes of producing a super-crispy cookie.
All that said, these were good chocolate chip cookies and my tasters really enjoyed them. I am quite tempted to try this recipe again -- but if I do I will make a few changes, including allowing more time to rest the dough, using miniature chocolate chips so I can flatten the dough more before baking, and baking the cookies on foil instead of parchment. I want to bake a chocolate chip cookie that shatters!
Recipe: "Ultrathin Chocolate Chunk Cookies" from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy: Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich, recipe available here at Serious Eats.
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