10 Levels of Chocolate Chip Cookies

C. C. C. Chocolate chip cookies. Are there three finer C words in the English language? Not that I can say here at the beginning of the video. I mean that is an awesome word and only Europeans can say it. But I'm okay with that because we have chocolate chip cookies. They have chocolate flavored biscuits. My ass. This episode is sponsored by Challenge Dairy. The go-to butter in my kitchen. Challenge, the butter with the elk on it, has innovated the way we use butter. They have these cubes in four tablespoon chunks so you can throw one into your noodles, your pan sauce, or your potatoes. Obviously butter is the key ingredient to great cookies so you're going to see a lot of it in today's episode. When you go for quality ingredients, you get quality results. So go for Challenge. For more info on Challenge and to find yourself some butter cubes, scan the QR code or head to the description. Chocolate chip cookies. One of God's little reminders that, see, not everything is awful. So how are we going to explore 10 levels of chocolate chip cookies? Are there even 10 levels of chocolate chip cookies? I'm going to tell you right now, yes, there is. And we're going to start with the very worst one. Keebler soft batch cookies, you will find, are the very worst chocolate chip cookies yet imagined. Why? Because they're bad. Watch the clip and you'll find out. I'm about to say. When I taste tested all the commercially available chocolate chip cookies, I gave this a one and it was the only one achieved by a non-sugar-free or gluten-free or whatever alternative cookie. This is the only straight up cookie that got a one. It is the very lowest expression of the medium. Let's see how far we're going to climb. Number one, they look awful. They don't have enough chocolate chips. I think I counted an average of three to four per cookie and something to do with their recipe, with how they bake them up, with how they're prepared and sliced. You very seldomly see chocolate chips on the surface. There are small exceptions, but for the most part, you're getting these pale pasty pucks of pathetic, pedantic, pillowy, soft chocolate chip cookies. Let's dig in. It just tastes so fake. Barely resembles a chocolate chip cookie. One of the worst, if not the worst expression of the medium that I can possibly think of. These are the kinds of cookies that you get at a budget funeral. I'm talking like nobody liked this guy. No family or just neighbors. They're like, this guy was there. I don't know. Get some Keebler Chips Deluxe Soft Batch, some big drums of coffee and call it a day. That's what it tastes like. So be kind to your neighbors. Put aside some money for a casket and a proper service. Don't leave that on your loved ones. And just don't ever get these, please. Slice and bake cookie dough is a novel enough idea. Homemade cookies in a snap. Plus cookie dough that you can eat raw. But are they any good? For more, we go to me now. Level two, or should I call it level tube? The stuff in the tube that more often than not, you're eating raw in the bathtub, reading a Nicholas Sparks novel. This is basically the same stuff as the packaged cookies, almost the same exact ingredients that you get to either eat raw, which is fun. You can also use them to, according to directions, make the smallest cookies in the world. So let's give both of those options a try. I'm gonna use my Babish Shears, available now on Amazon and in stores, to open the tube. Let's see if this tastes the same as it did when I was in college. It's not as good as I remember. I mean, I remember it not being terribly good, but it's got some weird flavor in it. All that to be said, having a tube of cookie dough like this and just eating it with a spoon or with your filthy little fingers, it's kind of nice. Baking directions. Heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Spoon dough by tablespoonfuls two inches apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 12 to 15 minutes or until edges are golden brown. Cool one minute, remove from cookie sheet. Time to remove the cookies. And a good rule to follow is if you can rotate the cookies without breaking them, they are ready to move. If they start to squish or squoosh or feel like they're gonna fall apart, let them rest a little bit longer. It's also typically a good idea to remove the cookies from the cookie sheets depending on your recipe as quickly as possible because the cookie sheet is still hot. It will continue cooking them and it will affect your final texture. All right, folks, there it is. A tubular cookie. It looks mighty fine. Like that doesn't look bad at all. What does it taste like? It's really the only two things that we have to worry about. Definite improvement on raw. That odd aftertaste is still there. It's way in the background. And something about a warm cookie, even if it's the lowest iteration, you're like, okay, I get it. Turns out the floor on chocolate chip cookies, pretty high. Let's go a little higher. Okay, bagged mix. Is this why you always say, let's get that bag, Babish fam? In a manner of speaking, yes. I am always trying to get that bag no matter what bag it might be. Preferably a bag full of money. But if it must be a bag of cookie dry mix, so be it. Level three takes things from tubes to bags because this is effectively the Pillsbury equivalent of like a Betty Crocker cake mix but for chocolate chip cookies. Did that make any sense? No? I understand. I've never seen these before. I might not have ever just visually registered them in the supermarket, but let's see how they turn out. Now there is a tip on the back of this bag saying you can substitute the butter for shortening and water to achieve different results. You know what? I'm gonna do both. I'm gonna do half a batch with butter, half a batch with shortening to find out exactly what kind of difference it makes. I already know, but I want you to know. Baking instructions. Set your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter should be completely softened or slightly melted. Combine cookie mix, softened butter, and egg in a medium bowl. Mix until soft dough is formed. Form dough by rounded teaspoons. Teaspoons. That's like this much, which I think is both cruel and unusual. So I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna make normal sized cookies. Step three, bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for eight to 10 minutes or until edges are set. Allow to cool for two minutes before removing from baking sheet. There you have it. We have our cookies baked with both shortening and butter. And as you can see, we have a kind of cracked up appearance on the shortening cookie. The butter one looks a lot more normal in terms of its texture. And the shortening one has this, it's almost like as though we put a layer of sugar on top. Let's start with the butter one. It's more of a control. It's already pretty stiff. Like it's still slightly warm, so it has some give to it, but it's like toward the edges, it's got crunch to it. Next, we have the shortening cookie, which is so much softer. It just yields immediately. The edges, while stiffer, are not crunchy like the butter one. Let's see what they taste like. What? Don't ask me how. I don't know how. The tube cookies taste better. They look better and they taste better. It's crazy because it has some actual ingredients in it. But yeah, this is level two, not level three. I'm sorry if that's confusing. Yeah, this is how you discover. You try. And I tried and I discovered that this tastes bad. For who does the house toll? It tolleth for Nestle, who cometh for your soul. Because they think that water is not a human right. Do you need water to bake their cookies? No. And that's how they get you. No matter how you might feel about Nestle, Toll House is the original chocolate chip cookie recipe. It was invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1938 at the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. This is basically the prototypical and I would say standard for chocolate chip cookies. Original Toll House chocolate chip cookies. Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. In a small bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract until creamy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in flour mixture gradually. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop onto ungreased baking sheets by rounded tablespoons. Bake for nine to 11 minutes. That's a beauty right there. Look at that. Even the bottom looks perfect. Look at that. That's crazy. It looks perfect. The prototypical watermark for chocolate chip cookies, the Toll House. It's a perfect chocolate chip cookie. I'd say that was probably 20 minutes of effort. Really pays dividends. Like it's remarkable how much better this tastes than the stuff out of the box or the bag or the tube. They're perfect. If you grew up eating these, you're a kid again. And isn't that what we're all trying to accomplish? It's just like childlike wonder. I almost lose the motivation to improve on this because it's just so damn classically good. But after the break, we're going to take a look at all the ways that you can improve the standard chocolate chip cookie recipe. Long. Hot. Hard. Slippery. Babish cookware. You know what I'm trying to say. For whom does the house toll plus? What Brad's trying to say is, can we upgrade Toll House? A Toll House plus, if you will. And for whom does that Toll House plus bell toll? Yeah. Level five, Toll House upgraded. In what ways can we upgrade the basic, almost perfect boiler plate chocolate chip cookie? First thing we can do is brown our butter. This is a five to 10 minute process that is going to add a ton of rich, nutty flavor to your cookies. It's going to darken their color. It's going to give them this wonderful toasty aroma and it's going to translate directly into the quality of the cookie. All we have to do is brown the butter. So I have the same amount of butter here, half a cup. Then I'm going to place into a small saucepan. I'm just going to gently cook it. When it starts getting a little squirrely like that, that means you can either reduce the heat or give it a swirl. You can see that the milk proteins, you can see these little white flecks that are starting to emancipate themselves from the rest of the butter. And now, as you can see, the milk proteins have fully separated. They've browned beautifully. There is not a pale one amongst them. Now, challenged dairy has 80% butter fat. When you brown butter, all the water cuts off, which means that you have reduced the weight of the butter. We're going to both add that back and halt the cooking, preventing the milk solids from burning, from carryover heat. So we're going to add that 20% of water back in the form of ice, adding just under 23 grams of ice to our butter. That's going to sizzle a little bit. Just mix it around. We're going to take this off the heat entirely to prevent the butter from browning too much. Now, basically we want this to solidify to the point of room temperature softened butter. Sometimes brown butter, even if you add the liquid back in form of ice, it still won't set up at room temperature. So I'm going to throw this in the fridge just until it solidifies a little bit. Not cold, just a solid instead of a liquid. The next way that we're going to upgrade our cookies is in the dry mix. And it's a pretty simple addition. We're swapping out about 30% by weight of our flour with bread flour. Why are we doing this? Bread flour has a higher protein content and protein leads to more gluten development. And normally this is frowned upon. We'd be like, oh, you're going to have a tough cookie. I beg to differ. That extra gluten development results in a chewier cookie. And I like a really chewy cookie. I like it to be fudgy and dense, crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. Contrastingly, if you want really tender, you know, your teeth just fall right through it kind of cookies, use cake flour. That adds even less protein overall. For this half batch, I've got 100 grams of all-purpose with 40 grams of bread flour. The same half teaspoon each baking soda, kosher salt. Tiny whisk these guys until homogenous. Our next upgrade is with the sugar. We're doing the same exact 75 grams of granulated white sugar. But for the brown sugar, we're going dark brown. Dark brown sugar has a higher molasses content. This is going to have three effects. It's going to darken the color. It's going to add more flavor in the form of like caramel-y molasses notes. And it's going to give it a denser, chewier texture, which personally I love. So our next upgrade is going to be the egg by adding a little more egg yolk specifically. I have one extra egg yolk. You want to add the whole thing for a full batch. But again, we're doing a half batch here. So I'm going to add about half of this whole egg yolk. This is going to add a lot of richness, flavor, fat. Give it an even better texture. There's brown butter ready for deployment. Of course, the same half teaspoon of vanilla extract, which I am clearly eyeballing. Beat these guys together until fluffed and latte brown. Now the last and final upgrade is going to be the chocolate. We are, of course, adding the requisite chocolate chips. I'm not going to add the full cup though because I want to make room for something else. So what I have here is a bar of semi-sweet chocolate. The reason we want to do a bar of some kind is so we can chop it. We want to chop some of it into big old chunks, but then some of it we also want to chop super finely into almost shavings. What this is going to do is not only give us de facto chocolate chunks, it's going to give us all these powdery little sliver bits, which are going to almost emulsify into the dough to some degree. And it's going to create little streaks, little streaks of chocolate. There we go. All right, these guys are headed into the oven for probably a little bit less time just because I'm just guessing, just guessing. All right, here come our upgraded Toll House, our original Toll House versus upgraded Toll House. And I don't even need to taste it to tell you there's going to be a different taste. It's got this toffee, almost coffee-like characteristic to it. It tastes more roasty and caramelly. Just got so much more complex flavor and it does indeed taste chocolatier. It's because of those little chocolate bits. As soon as you start chewing, they hit your tongue. I think because of the brown butter and the brown sugar, this is having a higher spread factor. And I do think that it's going to look a lot better after it's been in the fridge. So I'm going to make one more test, one of these after it's been in the fridge for at least an hour. Hell yeah, look at those huge differences made by different treatments of this dough. Simply by chilling it for 90 minutes before baking, more variation in color. We've got more height and we've got a way better texture. Slow fridge time goes from this kind of weird cookie to a like bakery level cookie. You would buy this for an elevated price at a coffee shop. You would, I would. So we've seen what a little bit of time in the fridge can do, but what about a whole lot more time in the fridge, if you know what I mean? More time in the fridge, literally more time in the fridge. Level six aged cookie dough. For whom does the aged house toll? Rule of three. You said rule of three in the last episode. And you abused that. What makes you think that I'd be okay with it now? Because this is actually the third time. You got me there. What we're going to explore now is what happens when you age cookie dough. For level six, we turned to one of the most popular secret ingredients of the last 10 years, time. On your right, you'll see a freshly made batch of cookie dough. On your left, you'll see the exact same recipe, same formula, same ingredients after three days in the fridge. So right off the bat, you can see there's a huge color difference. And that's really all you can see, but there's a lot more going on. Over the past three days in the fridge, moisture has evaporated from the cookie dough. It's become more concentrated in that way. The flour has fully hydrated, which is going to give us a fudgier, kind of meltier core. And flavors have developed, thanks to the enzymes that work with sugars or something. And this guy is going to bake up more beautifully, and I'm going to bake them side by side so you can see just how much better cookie it do. And there you have it, three days in the fridge versus straight into the oven. Right off the bat, you can see that we have better spread. We have a darker, more caramel-y color. We have a better looking texture. It looks like almost bubbly and oily as opposed to this one, which looks really flat, matte, and full of shat. It's a warm chocolate chip cookie. What am I, a monster? But it does taste like the standard chocolate chip cookie. Your Toll House. I get it. It's tough to wait three days for cookies. Planning was never my strong suit either. But God, the rewards are great. Even one night in the fridge is going to have a pronounced, visible, tasteable effect. The butter just explodes out of it. You know what I mean? Like when you bite into a really good cookie you can feel all the fat in it more immediately. Like it almost just bursts out of it. And even though it's thinner than the other cookie, even though it's thinner by almost 50%, it's soft, it's gooey, and it's got a nice chew to it around the edges. We have crunch and chew happening around the outside of the cookie. It's a textural wonderland. I've used that phrase before. It's a textural discovery zone. You have anybody else go to discovery zone growing up? There's no question that this is a roundly better cookie than unrefrigerated. Perfect. So there's a sink in these cookies? Common misconception. There's no actual sink in kitchen sink cookies. What we're actually referring to is the whole kitchen sink. It's a saying. It's an idiom. So for level seven, here we have our beautiful, perfect chocolate chip cookie dough. It's got brown butter, chocolate chips, and chunks, and it's been aged overnight in the fridge. Adding anything to this would not just be wrong, it would be disrespectful. But what if we added some stuff to it? Now I don't want to upset any purists, so we just have some walnuts here that I've lightly toasted in the oven. Giving them a little bit of dry heat before adding them to the cookies is going to improve their texture and their flavor. Just going to chop these up so there aren't too many big hunks and add them to the dough. Now we can and probably should stop here, but my little secret ingredient in my chocolate chip cookies is a little bit of hazelnut coffee. Just about a tablespoon's worth of really finely ground stuff. So you're going to want to get the whole beans so you can get like an espresso fine brine. If you get the pre-ground stuff, it's going to have big coarse grounds in there that are just going to make your cookies look speckled instead of just adding to the color overall. And I mean, as long as we're here, we might as well add some bergamot, a little bit of heath pieces, pretzels, and kettle chips are always a great hit of salt and oil and crunch. Maybe just a little bit of caramel corn and that's all we're going to add. Plus a little bit of cinnamon toast crunch. Look at that. Oh man. I love loading up my chocolate chip cookies with everything. Now, if you're adding pretzels and popcorn and chips and stuff, make sure that you're adding it after the dough has been aged. If you let it sit in there with the dough, it's going to absorb moisture. It's going to lose its crunch and it's not going to bring as much to the party as it would if you just mix it in fresh. Okay, here is our fully loaded cookies. They're armed, they're dangerous, and they're at large. Now, this raises an interesting question. Do these still qualify as chocolate chip cookies? All I have to say is, they have to be some of the most beautiful cookies I've ever made. They definitely are a little lumpy just from all the stuff that I put in them, but they're wrinkled in just the right ways. They're deeply browned around the outside. These are going to be the most texturally exciting, interesting, and let's face it, arousing cookies that have ever been experienced. Every texture you could possibly imagine, crunchy, chewy, melty, every bite is a little bit different. It's magic. The original Till House cookie is undoubtedly a classic. It is a near perfect food item. But this, it's not that it goes beyond perfect. It's that it almost redefines what perfect is. It challenges you to take in its entirety. No two bites are the same. So yeah, not sure if this is still a chocolate chip cookie. But if it is, it's my favorite chocolate chip cookie in the whole wide world. So you've made cookies with three Cs, but in this one you added a fourth, cash, which doesn't seem entirely food safe. Not at all, Bradley. But does it make it better? Level eight. Cookies so expensive, they made the top two buttons on my shirt disappear. Did you just notice that? It's the next day. I'm wearing a different shirt. These chocolate fevs were $30 for eight ounces. These chocolate chips out of Portland, New York, while they did not list their weight, I believe were around $18. This tiposero flour was like $15 for two pounds. The dozen eggs from which this egg hails costed very nearly $14. This jar of Nielsen Massey vanilla bean paste is 36 bucks for four ounces. I will say this one's kind of worth it. And then we got the matter of these two chocolate bars. These bars are 2.64 ounces each or 75 grams, and they costed $26 each. For reference, that's 35 cents a gram. Every bite of one of these is gonna cost you like three, four bucks. So what happens when we take these supposedly elevated ingredients and apply them to the standard Toll House recipe? I'm asking, do you know? No? Then I guess we have to find out. So I'm giving all these expensive ingredients the exact same Toll House treatment. I have to try these though. So this is the very expensive milk chocolates chips. I'm not a big milk chocolate guy. We'll see what happens. It's really good. What do they taste like compared to the Toll House? Wow. The Toll House have a much cheaper flavor, but it is a much more powerful, prevalent flavor. So this can definitely not be our only source of chocolate. We need the dark stuff in there to bring some punch, some acidity, and some, you know, chocolate. There you have it, folks. Super expensive Toll House. A normal batch of these cookies will run you about $6 total for ingredients. This guy clocked just shy of $56. So I have some quartered fevs that I'm going to just kind of shove in there a little bit. I'm also only going to do half of these. You know, if this is going to go up against the Toll House, it should be able to stand on its own two feet without any fancification of form. All right. These look great. It's not just because of the chopped chocolate in there. The dough, it almost looks like it was aged in the fridge. All right, let's take a look at Toll House versus the Toll Estate. So you can see that having chopped chocolate definitely does it a lot of favors. It's got these kind of channels and rivers of chocolate throughout. So let's see what the flavor diff is like. Totally different texture. It is glassy, crunchy around the edges and fudgy and chewy in the center the way I like it after the dough has been aged in the fridge. But I swear to God, I didn't age this freaking dough. You know what I think it is? Is the flour. This flour, 13 grams of protein per 100 grams. That's like bread flour. This is on the high end of the protein content. And apparently it's more coarsely milled than normal flour. So I think that might've caused the butter to not fully incorporate into the dough as much so that it kind of separated and fried, creating these really nice, crispy, crunchy edges. Man, that's cool. Science is cool. I mean, this isn't science, but it's cool. So it must be science. So what did we learn from the expensive cookie? Not that more expensive ingredients make a better cookie, but more purpose-driven ingredients create a better cookie. So a mixture of different kinds of chocolate, chopped and chips. So you get all them kinds of textures and flavors and a higher protein flour, bread flour, makes for a chewier, fudgier kind of cookie with nice, crispy, lacy edges. So I'm also just, just, just, just, just go with bread flour. Just make cookies with bread flour. Never thought I'd say it. Many moons ago, I referred to Lovin' Cookies as a thinking man's cookie. What does that mean? I actually have no idea. Really what it is, is a gorging man's cookie because it's a giant soft ball of melted cookie dough with an eggshell of crispy cookie on the outside. And eating one is a singular experience. By that, I mean, you can really only eat one and you have to try very, very hard. On to level nine, or should we call it level Lovin' because we're gonna make the cookies from Lovin' Bakery, a correctly famous New York City bakery with 20 locations nationwide now, famous for their chocolate chip cookies, which are basically a giant snowball of cookie dough with a barely baked shell of cookie around it. So how do we recreate these cookies? I have spent years trying to recreate them myself and so has the internet at large. It's one of the most popular copycat cookie recipes that exists and our own Alvin Cho has pioneered a damn near perfect recipe to recreate them at home. So that's what we're gonna do. One of the biggest barriers to entry with these cookies is temperature control. You want cold butter, which we've done before, but you wanna keep it cold. Normally with cold butter, you need to like, you know, beat the hell out of it to soften it enough to mix it with the sugars. In this case, we don't wanna warm up the butter too much by beating it like that. So we basically need to mix it very slowly and carefully with the sugar, keeping everything as cold as possible, I think to prevent spread. So I'm gonna follow Alvin's recipe to letter and if it doesn't work out, it's his fault, not mine. We have some refrigerator cold challenge cubes. I only need a full cup. I'm going to cut it into some small cubes. We're going straight into the stand mixer with the 400 grams of white sugar. We're creaming that together very slowly at first. We don't wanna warm it up. So now I'm gonna beat it up a little bit more and I just wanna get this to the point where it's creamy. It's smooth, there's no chunks of butter. So let's start adding eggs, cold eggs. Let's dump one of those bad boys in there. Once it's in, add the next. Okay, it's in. So I'm gonna add two teaspoons of vanilla. Vanilla paste is slightly less vanilla-y than vanilla extract. So I generally do twice what is recommended. If it calls for a teaspoon of vanilla extract, add two teaspoons of this stuff. It will affect the texture of your cookie, I think positively. So now I have a mixture here of 180 grams of all-purpose flour mixed with 173 grams of cake flour, two teaspoons of kosher salt, and a shocking, I would say, and almost upsetting, one and a half teaspoons of cornstarch. Very curious to see what role that plays in it. That's got it. There, now we got some stuff sticking, so we gotta scrape down the bowl. One cup of semi-sweet, one cup of dark chocolate, a cup and a half of walnuts, as much as I might oppose them. Oh, yeah. Okay, we're measuring out, if you can believe it, 170 gram chunks, boom. Three big old balls, which I'm now going to cover and fridge for one hour, and then into a 400-degree oven for about 10 minutes. Okay, as somebody who's eaten a lot of lava, these certainly looked the part. They didn't brown as evenly as I would like, and the point of these cookies is not to cook them through. They're still dough on the inside. You wanna sort of get them spread out like this and then brown them on the outside. So I think what I'm gonna try is a slightly lower temperature, like 375, 380 on convection. Let's see what that does. All right, convection at a lower temperature definitely created some more even browning. We got more browning on top. This looks really reminiscent of the proper genuine article. True to form, this is just packed with chocolate chips and a nice crunchy sort of exterior. Hats off, Alvin, you did it. This is a love-end cookie through and through. I don't know how this isn't a major health and safety hazard, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. So with love-end being one of the objective, great chocolate chip cookie experiences of all time, how do we go up from there? If that's level nine, what is level 10? Level 10. Level 10 cookies. Level 10. Level 10, this is where we pull out all the stops. I'm using all the tricks that I've learned over the years and over the course of filming this episode. First up, the flour. We have here 170 grams of all-purpose flour, 90 grams of bread flour, and I'm going to place them on a rim baking sheet, mix them up a little bit, spread them out. And whether you like it or not, we're gonna toast this flour at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 25 minutes, stirring it every five minutes until it's a lovely toasty golden brown. This is gonna add some more depth of flavor to our dough. It's gonna bring some nuttiness, some toastiness. The more we can layer that in there, the more resplendent our cookie is gonna be. It's been about 30 minutes. We've stirred every five minutes. As you can see, there's a non-dramatic but non-zero color change. Definitely a little darker, a little toastier, but really the big thing you're gonna notice is the smell. It smells like nuts. Now we need to let this cool completely. Don't wanna dump hot flour into our cookie dough. Now using multiple chocolates obviously amps up and diversifies flavor, but I'm gonna do something a little controversial, white chocolate. I'm not a big white chocolate guy, but we're not just gonna add white chocolate. We're spreading this stuff out and we're putting this guy in a 275 degree Fahrenheit oven for about 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. What this is gonna give us is caramelized white chocolate, which is fabulous. And this is where it gets a little tricky because as it really caramelizes, it starts to become like chunky and clunky. Sometimes this smooths out of its own accord, but it doesn't look like it's doing that. So instead we should be able to make short work of it with a food processor. You do not need to like white chocolate to like this stuff. Oh man, that's gorgeous. Almost gonna be the color of the cookies, but there'll be these like big streaks of it. I think it'll look a little otherworldly. And this is certainly not tempered, so I don't know if we can expect it to solidify snappy or shiny. So if you find that it's still kind of fudgy or not quite chocolate consistency, you can throw it in the fridge and wait until it's really solidified before chopping it up. Now onto the dough. We have our beautiful brown butter that's now been chilled and solidified. Now, as usual, we're gonna cream the butter together with our sugars, 250 grams of dark brown, 100 grams of white sugar. I'm also gonna add our two teaspoons of vanilla paste. Now we have two large eggs that I'm gonna add one at a time. Scrape down. Now onto the dries. In addition to that flour, we've got our usual teaspoon of baking soda, a tablespoon of kosher salt, tablespoon of finely ground hazelnut coffee. And then you might've noticed that we're going with a little bit less flour. You probably didn't, but that's because we're adding 50 grams of buckwheat flour. It looks great. It's gonna add like a darkness to the situation. Add the dries to the sort of wets and mix to combine. And there you have it. Look at that cookie dough. I'm gonna try some. That's insane. Between the hazelnut coffee, the toasted flour and the brown butter, it tastes like toffee. I've never tasted such a rich, complex cookie dough in my entire life. Probably because I've never made this specific iteration. So now this guy needs to age in the fridge three days. I wanna do the maximum amount. Any more than that and you're starting to get diminishing returns. In fact, I just happen to have some right here because this is TV. So we got our aged cookie dough here and I'm gonna break it up into the bowl. It's because I do wanna keep it, you know, cool. I'm gonna start with the same mix of dark chocolate and semi-sweet chocolate chips. Roughly a half cup each. Now I'm doing a whole four ounce bar of bittersweet baking chocolate. And of course, our caramelized white chocolate, probably four ounces. Now, as much as I love to put a whole bunch of other stuff in my chocolate chip cookies, I kinda wanna keep this purest. I wanna keep this just like, this is a chocolate chip cookie specifically. It's probably gonna put up a bit of a fight. Oh yeah. You don't wanna burn out your motor, but you also wanna make everything fly out. I'm gonna see how it behaves cold. I do want that kind of variation of color, which cold dough really is good with. Here we go, folks. The ultimate chocolate chip cookie is headed into the oven. 375 for 12 to 15 minutes, we'll see. All right, so couple issues here. I appreciate that they wanna be love end cookies, but they're not. And I'd rather them be a little bit flatter. The other issue I'm having is the color. Like these look healthy. They look like zucchini cookies or something. So I think we might be able to solve both problems at once. As you can see, the aged cookie dough is like twice as dark as the one that we made today. There's so much complexity happening with the flavor already that I wonder if it needs the overnight in the fridge. So only one way to find out. All right, here is our a la carte room temperature cookies and they've kept their shape too much. They don't look right. They don't behave right. They're just not right. And it's 10 o'clock on a Saturday night. So I think I need to call it. Normally this is the part where I beat myself up pretty good, but I'm gonna remind myself this is my first time making this recipe, that tomorrow is another day to try again and that we will get it right. We're at level nine and a half. So I'll see you guys tomorrow. Level 10 cookies, take two. It's been five days and more than 40 hours since beginning this episode. I forgot to turn my mustache this morning, so it's tickling my lips and I clocked my head really hard on the corner of the freezer yesterday. But here's a fun fact. I don't bruise. So instead of it looking like the way it feels, it just looks like a pimple. So I'm doing good. We're gonna take another crack at level 10 cookies. So for level 10 attempt do, I'm going to change the ratios a bit. I now have 175 grams of white sugar and 200 grams of dark brown. Dark brown prevents spread. It gives a great color and great flavor, obviously, but white sugar helps spread. So upping the ratio in the hopes that it gives me a little more. Now for the toasted flours, I use the same ratio of all purpose to bread flour, but I swapped the buckwheat for spelt. Very similar, you know, nutty, nice flavor profile, but it's more brown than black. So it's gonna blend in better with the cookies and lend a nicer color instead of making it look kind of gray washed. Now I am lowering the salts a little bit because I wanna add some flaky finishing salt. So we're down to two teaspoons of kosher salt. I'm upping the baking soda. This is both gonna help browning and it's gonna help spread to one teaspoon. My finely ground hazelnut coffee, one tablespoon's worth. So now we're gonna add that. That's weird. Okay, what I have here are some little specks of flour. I should have sifted it. Those are gonna cause problems. They're gonna be visible and they'll be gross. Okay, I don't see any more as I continue to manipulate this dough. Yeah, I don't see any. So I think we're cool. So for chocolate, I'm going with 15 ounces of total chocolate. So I'm doing five, five, five. Five semi-sweet chocolate chips, five chopped dark chocolate, and five of our caramelized white chocolate. Let's see how these guys spread out in the oven. And they're still puff balls. This has gotta be one of two things. One, I probably way overdeveloped the gluten when I beat up the cookie dough. So I'm gonna be a lot gentler with the dough this time. The other thing I'm concerned about is the hydration of the dough. It is rather a dry cookie dough. Like you can pick it up without even sticking to your fingers. So I think toasting the flour, it's obviously gonna remove moisture from the flour, which means that it's gonna absorb more moisture, which means there's gonna be less free radical moisture in the cookie dough. That all adds up to less spread. So what they need is better browning, more moisture, and less gluten development. Let's try that out. So I've toasted our flours. Now I am taking care to sift them. To compensate for the toasted flour, I'm going to add two eggs plus one egg yolk. That should bring a little more moisture and help spread with the extra fat. Okay, let's see if these guys spread and brown any better than their brethren before. Okay, definitely still a little puffy, but better spread and better color. Now I think what they need is a night in the fridge, both so they can be baked from cold and so that the flavors intensify. We're gonna get better browning after a night in the fridge. I think that's gonna be the key to taking these guys across the finish line. Let's see how they behave tomorrow. All right, I've tried different ratios of sugar. I've tried increasing the eggs. I've tried not toasting the flour, different kinds of flours, and I still can't figure out how in the Sam heck to get the thing to spread. What you've just seen is a historical recreation of what I assume happened when somebody figured out the delightfully named pan bang trick. This is a great thing to use on almost any cookie if you want a wider, flatter cookie with lots of channels of chocolate running through it. Basically just take it out of the oven two minutes early, whack it a few times, throw it back in for the last two minutes to help solidify, and you're done. So now I'm breaking apart and shaping my ultimate cookie dough which, you know, has given me some troubles. So does that make it ultimate? Yeah, sure, why not? We figured out how to make it work, how to make it look good. So, you know, yes. If you pre-scooped your dough like this and then let it age in the fridge overnight or longer, what's gonna happen is the outside is going to dry more than the rest of the cookie dough, and that dryness is going to translate to kind of a hardened, crackened layer on the outside of the cookie. So if you've pre-portioned like this, let them come up to room temperature just a little bit, 15 minutes, and then crack them open and weld them back together. That way you're exposing more moist cookie dough to the outside so it will spread better, it'll brown better, and it'll be better. Especially with the pan bang trick, this is where putting a chocolate fev, pressing it into the cookie dough just a little bit, the fev is going to spread out and flatten out. It will give them a bit of visual dazzle. Now we're gonna bake these at a slightly lower temperature, between 330 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and we're gonna do it for 14 minutes total. We're gonna bake it for six minutes, rotate them, bake for another six minutes, take them out, pan bang them, and then two more minutes to finish them off. You know what they say, if this tray's a whacking, don't come a jacking. Just this guy needs a little help. A little help, a little artistic license. Yeah, everybody else looks pretty flowy and random and pollocked out, all pollocked up. I know he was a bad guy, but so are all artists. And I'm not, that's why I'm not an artist, because I'm a really good guy. There we go, folks. The tray's a little messy, but those look to me like some level 10 cookies. I sprinkled some finishing salt on there, and now these guys need to cool probably at least 10 minutes on the tray until they are solid enough to move. And there you have it, level 10 chocolate chip cookies. Let's crack one open, shall we? Oh, buddy. See what happens. I would call that worth it. One of the more difficult cookies I've ever had make, and the rewards are commensurate with the effort. That big pool on top, you almost savor it for different bites. So you get a nice bit, ooh, there's some nice dark chocolate hit there. Get any bites outside of that, you're hit with the subtle coffee flavor, the toffee notes of having aged the cookie dough and the brown butter, these roasty, nutty notes. In spite of how thin they are, they're crunchy on the outside and fudgy and chewy on the inside. They transcend chocolate chip cookies almost. It's almost like they're not even chocolate chip cookies. It's like they're in their own category. But technically speaking, that is what they are. They have chocolate chips in them and they're cookies. And that's it. These are true blue chocolate chip cookies. And I think they're just about as remarkable as they can get. There you have it, folks. 10 levels of chocolate chip cookies. I honestly wasn't sure if I could pull this one off, but we got there. And I think you can see the progression of intricacy and quality as we go. You can kind of see the progression. You can see that these are store-bought, processed, and we're getting into some more homemade vibes here. And you can see there's more color variation. There's more shapes. There's more chocolate happening. There's this guy, which is taking wild risks. There's this guy, which is very clearly a play at gourmet. You have this guy, which is just, what the hell is that? And then you have the apex predator at the end. This is, I truly believe, it's going to come down to your personal preference, but I believe for me, this is a level 10 chocolate chip cookie. It is the best damn chocolate chip cookie I've ever had. And I have had a lot of chocolate chip cookies recently. That was about as challenging as it was rewarding. I learned so much. I hope you picked up some new tips and tricks or a whole new recipe you want to try. Thank you so much for watching. Please let me know in the comments below, what do you want to see 10 levels of next? What kind of recipe videos do you want to see? What's your shoe size? Be honest and keep banging out there. Pan bagging. And you know, we're human beings. Thank you again to Challenge Dairy for sponsoring this episode. Challenge is special because all of their dairy farmers are in California and the butter is all made in California, meaning from cow to butter takes no more than 48 hours. This means that the butter is incredibly fresh and that Challenge is sustainable with a low carbon footprint. With these new butter cubes, Challenge is perfectly portioned and ready to be grabbed for your next kitchen project. For more info on Challenge and to find yourself some butter cubes, scan the QR code or head to the description. That was a ripe old yarn about the chocolate flavor biscuits here on the Binging with Babish program. Tune in next week for new content, whether you like it or not. Till next time, I'm Babish and you are somebody else. Until we meet as one in the void.