Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've been in a mood to bake for a while, and more specifically I've been wanting to bake chocolate chip cookies. I've had Kenji's "Best Chocolate Chip Cookie" article saved for a while, and I finally bit the bullet and made them. I didn't have baker's chocolate to chop up so I had to substitute in regular semi-sweet chocolate chips, but other than that I followed his recipe as closely as I could.

The prep is fairly simple and is described in the link above. I will say, though, that I love the smell of browning butter. It's fragrant, buttery, caramel-y, and nutty all at the same time. It's a beautiful thing. After combining all of components, I scooped it into one of our glassware containers to let sit overnight.

After chilling overnight, the dough was ready to be scooped and baked. The recipe says it should make 28 cookies so I decided to make a dozen tonight, a dozen maybe tomorrow, and the last 4 the following night. This, however, is when my reading comprehension starts to fail me. Kenji notes that you should use a 1 oz ice cream scoop or tablespoon to parse out the cookie dough. For whatever reason, I figured our 3 oz ice cream scoop would work just fine. After scooping all 12 cookies out, I finally realized that something didn't look quite right, but by this time I wasn't going to redo things. The oven was preheated, and I wanted to get these in.

Because of the size, I had to adjust the cooking time a slight bit. Kenji recommends 13-16 minutes while rotating front to back and top to bottom rack midway through. I tried that by going 7 minutes and 7 minutes, but they were nowhere near done. I ended up rotating again, cooking 2 minutes, and then rotating a 3rd time, and cooking another 2 minutes. By this time they were starting to approach the proper amount of cooking so I pulled them out, put a small amount of sea salt on top, and waited to move them to the cooling racks.

After very impatiently waiting for the cookies to set a little more, M and I finally grabbed one each. These cookies were still a little too warm so they were still a little too soft. Our impatience was not unrewarded, though. These cookies are really good. They're soft and chewy just like we like them, and they have a good amount of sweetness in the cookie portion to balance the buttery and salty components while fully accenting the chocolate chips. Do I think using chopped chocolate chunks instead of chips would have been better? Maybe, but I'm not really going to complain. I have a feeling M and I will have no trouble devouring all of the cookies I made tonight plus any cookies I make in the coming days.