I was intrigued by the name of Sarah Copeland's recipe for her Thousand-Layer Chocolate Chip cookies, but after reading through the recipe itself, I was just confused. I understand hyperbole and I certainly wasn't expecting the cookies to literally have a thousand layers. But the introductory text to the recipe on Leite's Culinaria (and I'm not sure if it was written by Copeland herself or by editors from the website) says that the "the dough is folded over itself several times, like puff pastry, to create layers of flavor and texture." Yet when I read through the recipe -- and looked at the photo slideshow accompanying it -- there was no folding involved and the number of layers in the cookies seemed to be minimal. I decided to give the recipe a try anyway.
To make the dough, you beat room temperature butter with dark brown sugar and granulated sugar until light and fluffy; add egg yolks and vanilla; and incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt). I divided the dough into three portions, shaped each piece into a rectangle, wrapped them in plastic, and put them in the fridge.
Meanwhile, I chopped some Cacao Barry Extra Bitter Guayaquil 64% pistoles into small pieces. I took one rectangle of chilled dough, covered it with half of the chopped chocolate, and then topped it with another layer of chilled dough. The recipe says your rectangles of dough should be 4-inches by 6-inches but I patted the dough pieces into a slighter larger size because I needed more dough surface area to contain all of the chocolate. Then I added the remaining chocolate and last piece of dough on top, to form a stack of five layers of dough and chocolate. I rolled the entire stack to a thickness of about an inch. But the recipe doesn't include any instructions to fold the dough, so there were only two layers of chocolate between three layers of dough.
I used a 2-inch round cutter to cut out the cookies. In many cases, there was so much chocolate crammed between the layers of dough that the dough layers were not actually adhered to each other. And, lots chocolate just fell out of the sides of the cookies after I cut them. This was a very messy process. But I did the best I could to keep the cookies intact, tucking in loose pieces of chocolate wherever I could. I transferred the little layered cookie pucks to a baking sheet lined with parchment, brushed the tops with beaten egg, and sprinkled on a little fleur de sel before baking.
The cookies flattened out quite a bit during baking but they maintained a nice round shape and were quite uniform in size. The egg wash gave them a shiny top that reminded me of the almond cookies you get at an Asian bakery. Something that surprised me -- but that I should have expected after reading through the recipe -- is that these didn't look like chocolate chip cookies because very little chocolate was visible on top of the cookies. After all, all of the chocolate is encased inside the cookies, between the layers of dough. That said, most of the cookies did have a stray bit of chocolate here or there on top, where I happened to push it into the dough after it fell out from the middle.
Also, after cutting the first set of cookies from the neatly layered dough, I pushed together all of the scraps so I could cut more cookies. The second (and subsequent) set of cookies that I cut from scraps had chocolate bits pretty evenly dispersed throughout them, because the scraps were oriented in all sorts of different directions and I patted in all of the loose pieces of chocolate that were left behind from the previous cookies I cut. I got 25 cookies total from a batch of dough.
I really liked these cookies. They were nice and thin, crisp on the edges, and chewy in the middle. That said, I can't say that these are better than other chocolate chip cookies I've made, and I don't know that the results justify the extra effort involved. I can say that chopping the chocolate into small pieces and layering it between pieces of dough does produce one quite interesting feature. When I bit into a cookie, I could actually see a continuous thin layer of chocolate extending from edge to edge in the middle of the cookie. So there was the same amount of chocolate in every single bite -- but since the chocolate is chopped into such small pieces, I think that you could probably just mix the chocolate into the dough, scoop out cookies, and get the same functional result.
Recipe: "Thousand-Layer Chocolate Chip Cookies" adapted from The Newlywed Cookbook by Sarah Copeland, recipe available here at Leite's Culinaria.
To make the dough, you beat room temperature butter with dark brown sugar and granulated sugar until light and fluffy; add egg yolks and vanilla; and incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt). I divided the dough into three portions, shaped each piece into a rectangle, wrapped them in plastic, and put them in the fridge.
Meanwhile, I chopped some Cacao Barry Extra Bitter Guayaquil 64% pistoles into small pieces. I took one rectangle of chilled dough, covered it with half of the chopped chocolate, and then topped it with another layer of chilled dough. The recipe says your rectangles of dough should be 4-inches by 6-inches but I patted the dough pieces into a slighter larger size because I needed more dough surface area to contain all of the chocolate. Then I added the remaining chocolate and last piece of dough on top, to form a stack of five layers of dough and chocolate. I rolled the entire stack to a thickness of about an inch. But the recipe doesn't include any instructions to fold the dough, so there were only two layers of chocolate between three layers of dough.
I used a 2-inch round cutter to cut out the cookies. In many cases, there was so much chocolate crammed between the layers of dough that the dough layers were not actually adhered to each other. And, lots chocolate just fell out of the sides of the cookies after I cut them. This was a very messy process. But I did the best I could to keep the cookies intact, tucking in loose pieces of chocolate wherever I could. I transferred the little layered cookie pucks to a baking sheet lined with parchment, brushed the tops with beaten egg, and sprinkled on a little fleur de sel before baking.
Also, after cutting the first set of cookies from the neatly layered dough, I pushed together all of the scraps so I could cut more cookies. The second (and subsequent) set of cookies that I cut from scraps had chocolate bits pretty evenly dispersed throughout them, because the scraps were oriented in all sorts of different directions and I patted in all of the loose pieces of chocolate that were left behind from the previous cookies I cut. I got 25 cookies total from a batch of dough.
I really liked these cookies. They were nice and thin, crisp on the edges, and chewy in the middle. That said, I can't say that these are better than other chocolate chip cookies I've made, and I don't know that the results justify the extra effort involved. I can say that chopping the chocolate into small pieces and layering it between pieces of dough does produce one quite interesting feature. When I bit into a cookie, I could actually see a continuous thin layer of chocolate extending from edge to edge in the middle of the cookie. So there was the same amount of chocolate in every single bite -- but since the chocolate is chopped into such small pieces, I think that you could probably just mix the chocolate into the dough, scoop out cookies, and get the same functional result.
Recipe: "Thousand-Layer Chocolate Chip Cookies" adapted from The Newlywed Cookbook by Sarah Copeland, recipe available here at Leite's Culinaria.
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