After I made Ravneet Gill's "Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies," Dafna from Stellina Sweets told me that her favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe is the Whiskey and Rye Chocolate Chip Cookie developed by San Francisco Cooking School. I had never even heard of this recipe and decided that I had to try it as soon as possible.
I was a little annoyed that the recipe on bonappetit.com doesn't include ingredient weights, but I found an article on the website describing the development of the recipe that provides the original large-scale recipe with weights. The scaled down recipe is basically one-eighth of the original recipe. I generally bake pretty big batches of cookies during the week to distribute to friends and colleagues, so I made half of the original recipe, or approximately a quadruple batch of the scaled-down one.
To make the dough, you beat softened butter (I used regular unsalted butter even though the original recipe calls for Plugra) with sugar and brown sugar until light and fluffy; add eggs, vanilla, and bourbon; incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, rye flour, baking soda, and kosher salt); and stir in chocolate. I used Cacao Barry Guayaquil 64% extra bitter pistoles, and as directed in the recipe, I put half of the chocolate in the food processor and pulsed it into smaller pieces. I used a #16 scoop to portion out the dough (I got 80 cookies), and chilled the cookies for 24 hours.
The following day, I flattened the cookies slightly and sprinkled them with Maldon salt mixed with vanilla bean seeds before baking. The baked cookies had a speckled appearance because of all of the small pieces of chocolate in the batter, and if you looked closely, you could also see small black dots of vanilla bean seeds on top. I liked these cookies better than Gill's "perfect" chocolate chip cookies, because I thought they had a more complex, interesting flavor. I presume that the rye flour is an important contributor, although I'm glad that only 15% of the total flour is rye; I personally tend to dislike a strong rye flavor in baked goods. I could not taste the bourbon at all in the finished product.
While these were very good cookies with a crisp exterior and chewy interior, I still think that the Jacques Torres recipe is my favorite, because it produces a thick cookie with a hefty, hearty texture that I love. But these cookies got great reviews from my tasters and at some point I think I'm going to have to have a head-to-head chocolate chip cookie taste test to decide once and for all which chocolate chip cookie reigns supreme. I would also throw BraveTart's Chopped Chocolate Chip Cookies into the mix. But it's not a bad thing to have a lot of great chocolate chip cookie recipes to choose from!
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