Nothing seems to shoot me back to being a kid more than a nice big freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. Still warm from the oven with the chocolate chips still melted and dotting my fingers with warm chocolate the follow up unmistakable flavor of good quality butter and the almost caramelized hint of the sugars. As a rule, I’m not a milk drinker, but for one of these freshly baked cookies I will pour myself an icy glass of whole milk. It has to be really, really cold to add the perfect creamy contrast to the warm cookie.
Since this is a nostalgic cookie for me I decided early on that for them to have that authentic flavor I need to make them with salted butter. When I was a kid it was virtually impossible to find unsalted butter in the US. Following my reasoning I should stick with Nestlé’s chocolate chip morsels, but I have to say, the flavor is so much better with Guittard Semi-Sweet Morsels that I had to bend my rules.
There are some oddities in this recipe; you’ll notice I use both room temperature butter and melted butter and egg yolks instead of the whole egg. This is just my preference, melted butter adds a nice almost candy-like snap to the cookies, but if you melt all the butter I think they become too thin and lacy. The egg yolks help create a density that you won’t get using the whole egg. However, if you’re in a hurry and don’t have the time to mess with the details, use all softened butter and whole eggs and you’ll get a nice big tasty cookie.
Chocolate chip cookies should be large, dimpled with chocolate chips, and larger than life. While you eat them, you should be completely captivated by the cookie and not distracted by phones or TV. That’s how a kid would eat them.
½ pound salted butter, one cube room temp, one cube melted and cooled
1 C granulated sugar
1 ½ C brown sugar
1 ½ t vanilla
3 egg yolks
3 C flour
1 ½ t baking soda
1 ½ t salt
2 ½ C chocolate chips
Combine the butter with the sugars and vanilla and beat until fluffy. Add the egg yolks and beat until well combined. Stir in the dry ingredients and stir in the chocolate chips. Place dough in large scoops on a parchment lined baking sheet. Keep plenty of space between them because they will spread. Bake 350 for 15-20 minutes. Makes 2 dozen large cookies.
I love the durability of chocolate chip cookies. You can freeze the dough unbaked shaped into balls and bake a few as you want to enjoy them. Or you can bake the whole batch and freeze the excess and heat the cookies in a toaster oven for that freshly baked experience.
