Recipe #4 - Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies

Intro

My brother challenged me to bake my way through the New York Times Top 11 Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes, mostly so maybe I would send him some to “taste-test.”

And why not?

I printed all the recipes, scanned the ingredients and spent about $60 on the stuff I did not have, like cake flour and coconut sugar - not including the cookie scoop that I have always wanted and finally bought. I did not buy any super special ingredients. No chocolate feves, no Maldon salt.

The Recipe

Cookies should not be this much work.

Seriously, this one gets an F from the baker perspective. Refrigerate the dough? Ok, sure, that’s pretty standard. Freeze the cookies - also not unusual, although I really want to know what the hell freezers these people have that they can fit an entire baking sheet full of cookies into one. I suppose I could manage…if I had nothing in the freezer.

The dough itself is nothing special, and seems short on chocolate (but works out in the end). Also, the recipe has a surprise “add 2 tablespoons of water” in the directions that is not included in the recipe, so watch for that.

But the real deal-breaker here is the “easy trick of banging the pan a few times during baking.” I’m sorry - NOT EASY. Also, hot. And complicated.

The idea here is that when the cookie is at that stage of just starting to spread - the edges are firming up but the centers are still raw and domed - you bang the cookie sheet, the center drops a bit and the raw dough fans out the edges and creates the crinkles. Although the directions say you can just drop the pan on the rack, like, ONCE, I needed to bang it several times to get the dough to drop and fan out.

This meant that every 2 minutes, I was bending over with my head half in the oven, banging a cookie sheet on the oven rack. Alternatively, you can bang it on your stovetop, which is just as loud and stupid and scares the cats and makes the husband leave the house.

All this banging and spreading…and OMG this sounds like porn.

Uh. Anyway. The chocolate spreads as well. The end result is a somewhat unattractive, flat, wrinkled giant cookie that has had all the structure that flour provides beaten out of it, and the texture from the chocolate chips is also destroyed.

Is it edible? Sure. If you like a super thin, chewy cookie - or if you are only in it for the sugar and chocolate - it’s nothing more than OK. One upside: if you are a Corner Brownie Person, you may like the edges of this cookie. You know who you are.

And because we like science here at Usual and Ordinary, especially Baking Science, I tried making regular-size crinkle cookies, which were a failure:

I tried rolling one up like a taquito, just for kicks, and that was an interesting idea but very messy. And then I made a sheet of regular cookies (bang-free), and that was a little better but not much:

The Reviews

Me: Too much work for a mediocre cookie.