Rob's Robust Chocolate Chip Cookies

You will need:

Ingredients	Imperial	Metric	Adjustments	Ingredient Effect
Unsalted Butter	0.75 cups	170 grams		Butter will provide flavor, aroma, and texture to the cookies. Adding more will result in an oilier cookie, while adding less will yield a drier, crumblier cookie. I prefer Kerrygold because it doesn't froth as much during browning, so it's easier to see when it's done.
Unsalted Butter 2.0	2 Tblspn	25 grams		This is the same as the other butter, but different. DON'T BROWN THIS BUTTER, JUST KEEP IT SEPARATE.
Brown Sugar	0.75 cups	150 grams		Brown sugar provides sweetness, color, aroma, and moisture to the cookies due to the molasses inside. The sugar ratio can be adjusted to make a softer, denser cookie (more brown sugar than granulated sugar) or a lighter, airier cookie (more granulated sugar).
Granulated (white) sugar	0.5 cups	100 grams		White sugar provides raw sweetness to the cookies with less aroma, color, and moisture. As stated above, recipes with higher ratios of granulated sugar to brown sugar will have lighter textures.
Eggs	2 imperial big ones	2 metric big ones		Eggs provide moisture, structural integrity, and act as an emulsifier to bring oils in the butter and moisture from other ingredients together into a delicious dough.
Vanilla Extract	2 teaspoons	10 mL		Vanilla extract is an exceptionally fragrant ingredient that will drastically alter the cookie's flavor. Genuine vanilla extract will be better than imitation, but something is better than nothing.
Flour	2.25 cups	395 grams		Binds liquid ingredients into a pliable dough. Too much flour yields drier, flakier cookies, while too little yields runny, unstructured cookies. These cookies do quite well with gluten-free flour if needed. Gluten-free flours with stronger aftertastes may be tempered with extra salt, sugars, and vanilla. If the flour tends to make dry cookies, perhaps reduce the amount here and add more heavy cream to bolster the moisture.
Baking Soda (sodium bicarbonate)	1 teaspoon	4.8 grams		Leavens the dough by releasing carbon dioxide while baking. Adding more results in lighter cookies, while less will result in denser cookies. 1-1.5 teaspoons is a good range. A relatively small adjustment will lead to a noticeable difference in texture.
Salt	1 teaspoon	6 grams		Salt makes your mouth water after a bite, and it enhances flavors and aromas, particularly those of the chocolate in these cookies. It is important to note that the type of salt being used will change the volume used. Mass will stay the same (unless you make an adjustment). This recipe's volume is for Diamond Kosher Salt. Morton's Kosher salt is quite dense and requires about half the volume stated here. Don't use table salt if at all avoidable (it can have additives like sugar to tone down the saltiness).
Chocolate Chips	1.25 cups	220 grams		I like to use Guittard Super Cookie Chips (48% cacao), but these are stupidly expensive. Using cut-up pieces of your favorite chocolate or mixing semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips also works very well! I have used both those methods in the past! Cutting and mincing wafers adds a slight chocolate flavor to the dough, thanks to the chocolate dust. A chocolate chip cookie cannot exist without the titular chocolate chips. There are many kinds, find your favorite method and use it!
Maldon's Salt	1 imperial pinch per cookie	1 metric pinch per cookie		Maldon's salt serves three purposes: aesthetics, texture, and flavor. This salt is meant to enhance the cookie's sweetness on the outside while providing a nice crunch, and the crystals look fantastic! Maldon's salt can be replaced with Fleur de sel or Sel gris, and while kosher and sea salt could be used, they will not be as good. This isn't a required ingredient per se, but it's a definite improvement.

All ingredients are grouped chronologically when you'll need them, but it's not set in stone.

Part 1: The Butter

1. In a small saucepan, add 3/4 cup of butter and melt it over medium heat. Continuously stir until the milk fats in the butter toast and turn brown.

   1. The milk fats will first start to float and cling to the outsides of the pan.
   2. The butter will begin to boil and clear as the milk fats sink and move towards the center.
   3. You'll probably smell browning butter before you see it. The smell is very apparent! It will smell like a fudge shop.
      1. Having browned butter many times now, I am not as sensitive to the smell as I have been in the past, though this may have something to do with the butter I use.
   4. Take the butter off the heat and check for the browned milk fats in the butter by stirring; there may be lots of froth on top. Low and slow is the way to go!
   5. If there are still lots of cream-colored milk fats in the bottom, put the butter back on the heat and continue, checking every minute or so.

2. Once the milk fats have browned, you should begin to cool the butter. There are a couple of ways to do this:

   1. Run cold water on the outside of the pan. DO NOT get water in the brown butter!!
      1. Water falling into the browned butter rehydrates the toasted milk fats (you just spent all that time removing the water), and it makes it look gross. It's probably still fine.
   2. You still want the butter warm enough to melt more butter. Why, you ask? Because we're going to add the other portion of butter, and it will need to melt.

3. To the still-warm butter, add your other portion of butter. This will help to emulsify the browned butter with the moisture in the eggs and vanilla, so your cookies aren't as greasy after they bake.

4. Let your butter cool down even more. Preferably to the point where you can touch the pot for an extended period of time. I think you'll be okay if you're impatient here, but I haven't compared the effects of using browned butter at different temperatures.

   1. This will most likely affect the aromatics in the vanilla, but you're going to be baking the vast majority of those out in the oven anyway.

5. With cool, melted brown butter, add the vanilla extract to the pan and stir until they join in an amalgam of holy aromatics.

   1. Adding the semi-hydrophobic vanilla extract to the butter (which is now dehydrated hydrophobic fats, then supplemented with regular butter) allows the aromatics in the vanilla to adhere more strongly to your tongue (more tasty goodness) and allows the aromatics more time to get to your olfactory sensors (more smelly goodness).
   2. If you forget this step, just add the vanilla in part 2 after adding the eggs and sugars.

Part 2: The Wet Ingredients

1. Mix the brown sugar, white sugar, eggs, and newly-browned-and-partially-rehydrated butter into a medium bowl (probably the second largest one you have, save the big one for last) and combine them!
   1. A spatula will work best at first, but I use an electric whisk here. These mix the ingredients very well and add a lot of air to the mixture. I'm not sure if the air is important, but it could be.
   2. I whisk the ingredients together until the color gets much lighter. It starts as a medium-to-dark brown but transitions to a medium-to-light tan.

Part 3: The Dry Ingredients

1. Mix the Flour, Baking Soda, and Salt into your largest bowl and whisk and/or mix them together. I don't judge. At least, not out loud.
   1. Easy peasy.
2. Scoop the Wet Ingredients into the Dry Ingredients and mix them together until all the clumps of flour have disappeared.

Part 4: The Chocolate Chips

1. Pick which chocolate chips work and fold them into the dough. Make sure there are no pockets of chocolate chips, and that there aren't chip deserts. We don't want a cookie with too much chocolate, or one lacking them.
   1. You can do it!

Part 5: The Ol' Dough Chill

1. Portion the dough into air-tight tupperware using a 1/4 cup scoop.
   1. Plastic wrap will be fine, just make sure there aren't holes, as the dough can dry out during this step.
   2. Also, keep in mind that large deviations from 1/4 cup may require time and temperature adjustments, but definitely go for it! New York-style cookies are great!
2. Place the cookie dough balls into the fridge and keep them there for 12-18 hours or at least 4 hours if you absolutely can't wait.
   1. This step does lots of good things for the cookies, like recrystallizing the sugars, resolidifying the butter, and making the texture more dense and softer as a result! No skipping!
   2. Returns diminish after ~12 hours, but these can keep in the fridge for more than 48 hours, to be baked fresh when you want them.

Part 6: Bake 'em

1. Pre-heat your oven to 385°F or 195°C
   1. 400°F (205°C) may be better for other ovens. I have a GE oven, and I've found that convection ovens and gas ovens tend to run hotter than normal electric ovens. I used 420°F in the old, nasty oven I first tested these cookies in, so you may need to experiment with your oven.
   2. I use a broiler pan with aluminum foil. For some reason, plain cookie sheets make my cookies spread out and flatten, which I don't prefer.
   3. Move a cooking rack to the middle of the oven especially if you're using a gas oven. I've burned the bottom of these cookies before. It's heartbreaking.
2. Place the cookie dough balls onto your baking implement of choice at an inch or two apart!
3. Take a pinch of your Maldon's Salt and add it to the top of each cookie before it goes in the oven.
4. Set the timer for 12 minutes and place the cookies in the oven.
5. Once finished, pull cookies out and transfer them off your baking implement and allow them to cool for like 30 minutes. There are TWO^TWO reasons:
   1. Heat is gonna hide a lot of the flavors (pain hurts and stops you from enjoying things, but also because the aromatic molecules vaporize and escape your olfactory sensors more easily).
   2. The cookies continue to cook a bit from their residual heat, giving them a more stout construction that can handle arduous journeys stacked on a plate.
   3. They will be just as gooey in the center after cooling as they are after coming out.
   4. You've made it this far, you're doing great, just a bit more waiting.

Part 7: Enjoy

1. Eat them however you want. I like them while listening to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
   1. For those you don't finish, these cookies hold up superbly after freezing in an air-tight bag.
   2. I've been told that air fryers work great for warming these back up. Some experimentation may be required.