After seeing Tara O'Brady's photos of her "Basic, Great Chocolate Chip Cookies" in my Instagram Feed for the umpteenth time, I decided I should give the recipe a try. I don't own Tara's cookbook Seven Spoons, but the recipe on her website, and her prose is just exquisite. She writes that the cookies "stay in fattish mounds, with their humped backs shot through with
crackles, squidgy without being underbaked, and with a sweetness
straightened by salt."
To me, the most distinctive features of this recipe are that it uses melted (but not browned) butter and doesn't require a mixer. You pour melted butter into a bowl; whisk in brown sugar and granulated sugar; add the eggs and vanilla; stir in the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, and kosher salt); and fold in chocolate (I used Callebaut 2815 callets). I used a #24 scoop and got 31 cookies from a batch of dough. While you can bake the dough immediately, I chilled my cookies for 24 hours before baking to improve the flavor.
These cookies were tasty, and I especially liked the fact that they were packed with chocolate. However, they are not making it on my list of favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes (and admittedly, I have really high standards when it comes to chocolate chip cookies). The cookies were chewy but I thought the texture was average. Despite the fact that I had chilled my dough for a full day, the flavor seemed a little flat and not fully developed.
I do appreciate that this recipe is dead simple, and as Tara points out, the fact that you don't even need to wait for butter to soften means that you can have cookies coming out of the oven only 30 minutes after you start. That's no small feat. I am curious how these cookies taste when they are baked immediately, but this recipe did not impress me enough to want to try it again.
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