How One of NYC's Best Bakers Makes Chocolate Chip Cookies

Listen, between you and me,

there are two things that are gonna make

the perfect chocolate chip cookie,

malted milk powder and brown butter.

These two ingredients are going to take your cookies

to the next level.

My ideal chocolate chip cookie, when I bite into it,

I want a little crispiness around the edges.

I want it chewy in the middle,

more chocolate chips than is normal sea salt on top.

I'm asking a lot of a chocolate chip cookie,

but I'm gonna show you how to do it.

I'm Caroline Schiff, and today I'm gonna show you

how to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

[bright music]

First thing we're gonna do is brown the butter.

This is unsalted butter.

When you're browning butter, essentially what's happening is

you are separating the milk solids out of the butter

and starting to caramelize them.

That's the part that's getting brown.

You just want to get it in a pan over like medium high heat.

Your butter's gonna melt, it's gonna bubble away,

and then you're gonna start to see it

caramelize on the bottom of the pan.

Browning butter for this recipe is really crucial.

It adds nuttiness, kind of caramelliness, toffee flavors.

It's gonna just give you

a exceptionally delicious cookie.

So once I see those milk solids start to caramelize,

I'm gonna really start to whisk it up.

I want them incorporated into the brown butter

because that's what all the flavor is.

Once the caramelization starts,

it's gonna happen pretty quickly

so you don't want to walk away from this.

The whole process should take maybe five minutes.

The smell is unbelievable.

I want everything in my life to smell like brown butter.

I want to smell like brown butter.

The butter's got this beautiful sort of honey hue now.

All right. I think we're good.

Here's our beautiful brown butter.

We're gonna let it cool down

and then we'll make our dough.

[pleasant music]

We're gonna start with the dry ingredients,

the most important of all, malted milk powder.

So what is malted milk powder?

Malted milk powder is a combination of dry evaporated milk,

malted barley, and wheat.

This ingredient right here is why everything

at a diner tastes so delicious.

Malted milkshakes, pancakes, waffles.

It's toasty, it's nutty.

I like to think that it's like a je ne sais quoi.

It's just like, hmm, what's that?

Let's talk about the flours that we're using.

We're using two kinds. First, all-purpose flour.

It's all purpose you can use it for most things,

but we're gonna add some bread flour.

It's got a higher gluten content. What does that do?

It adds to the chewiness. We're gonna add the salt.

People just aren't salting their baked goods enough.

I will die on this still.

We salt savory food

and we should be salting our sweets as well.

Baking soda and finally, the star of the show are gorgeous,

nutty, toasty, malted milk powder.

You probably noticed no baking powder

in here, just baking soda.

Baking powder makes for a cakey cookie.

I do not like cakey cookies

and I don't think you should like them either.

You just want to whisk it,

make sure you break up those lumps and that's it.

Okay. Dry ingredients, done.

Let's talk chocolate.

I am using milk chocolate chips.

The milk chocolate in my mind really complements the malted

milk powder, complements that savoriness that it has

and that nutty quality

with all the sweetness that's in here.

It's a beautiful balance.

These are Guittard milk chocolate chips.

They're really easy to find.

In a lot of recipes, it'll say

use the highest quality chocolate you can find.

That is great,

but regular supermarket chocolate chips are great.

You'll notice these are really nice big chips.

Go big or go home. I like how these are gonna distribute.

They're just really satisfying.

You get like really nice big pockets of chocolate.

So a lot of people will add the chocolate chips

to the final dough.

I just toss them right in with the dry,

just kind of get all that stuff together.

Dry ingredients, done. Let's move on to the wet.

So we're gonna start with our brown butter.

You want to make sure you get in all

of those glorious little caramelized nutty bits.

So we've got two types of sugar. We have dark brown sugar.

So dark brown sugar has moisture in it.

It's got molasses, more depth of flavor,

and this helps with making the cookie chewy, which we want.

We love. We love a chewy cookie.

And then we have regular old granulated sugar.

Granulated sugar does not have moisture content

and this will also help with those crispy edges.

We're gonna add eggs.

A lot of recipes will say that you need

to use room temperature eggs, which is great, lovely,

but I have made this recipe so many times

and I've made it with eggs that are brought up to room temp

and I've made it with eggs that are right out of the fridge.

And you know what? Don't worry about your eggs.

So crack your eggs into a separate small bowl first

so you don't get any shells.

And then we're gonna add them.

Oh, I just saw a giant shell. Don't do that.

It's so embarrassing.

We're gonna add pure vanilla extract.

I love pure vanilla extract.

It has beautiful fragrance and complexity to it.

If you only have imitation vanilla extract,

it's totally fine and you can use it

and your cookies will be delicious.

I'm gonna whisk this up.

I like to whisk it for like two to three minutes.

You want to make sure you break up all those lumps

of brown sugar.

It's just getting light and thick and pale.

And this ensures that your butter is fully incorporated.

Look at that, beautiful ribbons, buttery sugary ribbons

and it smells incredible.

Look how gorgeous this is. Nice and opaque, light.

We're good to go.

Okay, we have our beautiful emulsification

of brown butter and sugars and eggs,

and we're going to add our dry ingredients.

You can just dump it in all at once.

I like to use a spatula.

You just want to work this together until there's no

dry patches and it's totally uniform

because we were using the butter when it was still melted.

This is a really easy cookie dough to bring together.

Look at that. I just want to eat this.

If you weren't watching, I would.

So this next step is super important.

We are going to cover our dough

and chill it for at least five hours.

This is going to help the flavors develop.

It's gonna harden up the butter a little bit

so we can scoop it.

They won't spread too, too much in the oven.

Chilling it overnight is ideal.

I think that's gonna give you the very best results,

but five hours will get you there.

So we're gonna chill this

and then we can scoop the cookies and bake them off.

[pleasant music]

So this is a cookie scoop and I highly recommend getting one

because it'll make your cookies super evenly portioned.

It's about a two-ounce scoop

and I am going to line them up

on parchment lined sheet trays.

And for these cookies, all you need is parchment paper.

They have plenty of butter in them,

so they're not gonna stick to anything.

And these are gonna be nice big cookies.

And I'm gonna do five cookies per tray

spaced nicely apart so they don't spread

and run into each other.

Yeah, we got enough for one more cookie.

No cookie dough left behind.

We're gonna top each cookie with more chocolate.

We want those beautiful kind of puddles of chocolate on top

of the cookies as well as all that chocolate inside.

So I just kind of mush a few chips on top of each

and you don't want to press the cookie down and flatten it

because it's already gonna spread

a good amount in the oven.

You just want to press down enough so

that the chips kind of stick on top.

You could just eat these balls of cookie dough too.

I mean, I'm not like endorsing that you do that,

but I'm not gonna like stop you.

Nobody's gonna stop you. Use up all these extra chips.

A lot of recipes I just feel like there's not

enough chocolate chips.

It's chocolate chip cookie people. Stop messing around.

Last very important thing. I've said it before.

I'll say it again.

Nobody is salting their baked goods enough.

We're gonna top each one of these

with some flaky sea salt.

It's just gonna make everything pop

and give that little bit of savoriness that we want.

So a nice pinch on top of each.

So my oven is set to 350 with racks in the middle

and our cookies are ready to bake.

So these cookies are gonna bake for 16 to 20 minutes.

They're gonna be nice and golden brown around the edges,

but still look kind of nice and soft in the middle.

Gorgeous. They smell amazing.

That malt, that nuttiness,

you can see it's like crispy edge,

but I can feel the center is just nice and soft.

Ugh, it's exactly what I want.

I always let my cookies cool right on the trays.

I don't even bother with a rack.

I've done it both ways and this works

and is less fussy, so just leave them.

You can enjoy them warm or let them fully cool,

but warm is like I am going to just make a stack of cookies.

It's so satisfying. I love doing it.

Oof, they're still a little warm. Let's do it, oh my God.

Like look at this.

I mean, imagine just walking into your kitchen

and seeing this stack of cookies.

They look so perfect. I'm ready to eat one now.

[pleasant music]

It's so perfect. It's almost like toffee on the inside.

But I get like a beautiful crunch

around the edges and the malt powder.

It's a little savory. It's nutty, it's caramelly.

These cookies are like over the top.

This is like a warm hug.

This is like the most perfect nostalgic

specimen of a cookie.

I'm so happy. This is an extraordinary cookie.

But it wasn't that hard.

It was two special secret ingredients,

the malted milk powder, the brown butter,

and a couple of simple techniques.

It just makes these cookies exceptional.

These exceptional cookies along with

so much more is in my book Daily Dessert.

I encourage you, get your malted milk powder,

brown your butter and make these cookies.

[pleasant music]