Is it possible to have the perfect chocolate chip cookie? America’s Test Kitchen thinks so.

This isn’t your typical chocolate chip cookie recipe so you shouldn’t expect it to be as simple as the recipe on the side of the chocolate chip cookie bag. You have to do a couple of things that take a little more time than normal but they add a lot to the final product and it’s more a time thing rather than it being difficult. For example, you have to brown the butter and then whisk both sugars, salt, and vanilla together a few times. I know it seems weird, but just trust the process on this!

A few changes we made to the recipe include swapping out the chocolate chips for chopped chocolate (we used Lindt 70% chocolate bars). We also used salted butter rather than unsalted and then halved the amount of salt called for in the recipe since the butter had salt in it. We didn’t put nuts in our batch, but we might try toasting walnuts and grinding them into a fine powder next time since my husband wants the nutty flavored distributed rather than chunks of walnuts randomly.

Browned butter adds a nutty complexity to this cookie and when combined with the chopped chocolate bar rather than chocolate chips it really kicks things up a notch. We added a sprinkle of finishing salt on half of these for a unique flavor as well. Next time, we might cut back on the total sugar and increase ratio of brown sugar to granulated sugar to see if that makes it a little less sweet and to add a little chewiness. Visually these look gorgeous, especially since they’re using a bigger cookie scoop.

Baking Ease	8
Time Spent	8
Taste	10
Visual	10

Recipe Used: America’s Test Kitchen