THE PERFECT CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE

I rarely bake cookies nowadays, but when I saw this New York Times chocolate chip cookie recipe on a food blog, I knew I just had to try it out. After all, it claims to be the "perfect" chocolate chip cookie, and curiosity got the better of me. 

Most of the ingredients were easy to source, except for the chocolate chips. When I finally did find them at Whole Foods I balked at the $3.99 per 100g price tag. For 1.25 lbs. it would have cost me almost $23. I wasn't ready to fork out that much on a recipe I never tried before, so I got regular bittersweet chocolate chips, which I also found at Whole Foods.

When it comes to following recipes, modifications are standard procedure for me. For example, I almost always cut the sugar by half. But this time I stuck to the instructions pretty faithfully. The only thing I changed were the chocolate chips, and I used cane sugar instead of regular granulated white sugar.



It's a pretty easy recipe to follow; the only quirk is the 24-36 hour resting period. Apparently it's important for the dough to rest for that long so that it does its magic. Also, when you roll the dough into 3.5 oz. balls, they're obscenely huge. I could only fit four balls into my baking pan. The size of the ball falls somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball. It's ridiculously big, and I worried it would spread out into an ginormous cookie. But to my relief it didn't.

The result? Perfection indeed. It's the best damn chocolate chip cookie I've ever had. It's also the most rich, decadent cookie I've probably ever eaten. But worth every crumb. I found that I couldn't have a whole cookie in one sitting. These are substantially sized.



The part that I enjoyed the most is the coarse sea salt that's sprinkled on top. It's what makes the cookie. I absolutely love the combination of salty and sweet.

I want to make this recipe again but with the fancy French chocolate chips it calls for. I'm curious to find out if they make the cookies even better.