Unsweetened Chocolate, Sweet Rewards: Double Chocolate Cookies

I use a ton of chocolate in my baking -- mostly bittersweet, but also milk chocolate and white chocolate in lesser quantities. The type of chocolate that I use most rarely is unsweetened chocolate; it's always melted and mixed into the batter. But Joanne Chang's recipe for Double-Chocolate Cookies from Flour actually includes unsweetened chocolate -- not melted -- that is mixed into the batter. Chang says that the recipe originated from an incident at the bakery where a new baker accidentally mixed in unsweetened chocolate chunks, instead of bittersweet chunks, into some cookie batter. While the resulting cookie was too bitter, they realized that unsweetened chocolate in moderation could make a stellar cookie.

Like many of Chang's cookie recipes, this dough requires several hours of chilling before you can bake it, so you need to plan ahead. To make the dough, you beat sugar and eggs until pale and thick; add a cooled mixture of melted unsweetened chocolate, melted bittersweet chocolate, and vanilla; and fold in the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, salt, espresso powder, shaved unsweetened chocolate, chopped bittersweet chocolate, and toasted walnuts). I buy unsweetened chocolate in flat discs and I tried grating it on a microplane and it was unmanageable. So I threw it in the food processor and ground it until the pieces were quite fine, about the size of coarse grains of sand. I chilled the dough overnight before proceeding.

The next day, I scooped out the dough using a #16 scoop and got 20 cookies from a batch. The recipe says you should bake the cookies until they are cracked on top, but my cookies didn't crack; they ended up with more of a wrinkly appearance. I didn't think these cookies looked particularly attractive, but boy were they delicious! The cookies had a brownie-like texture -- rich, without any chew. They were deeply, amazingly chocolate-y, and I thought the walnuts were such a good addition (not surprising since I also love walnuts in my brownies). The recipe headnote does a perfect job of describing this cookie: "It is a little like a brownie, a little like fudge, and quite like the most chocolaty treat you'll ever eat." 

Eating one, I would never guess that there were small bits of unsweetened chocolate in the cookies. The idea of adding unsweetened chocolate bits into a cookie seemed like a high risk proposition -- but it paid back rich, chocolate-y rewards.

 

Recipe: "Double-Chocolate Cookies" from Flour by Joanne Chang.