Call Me Mr Christie

I decided, on a lark, to make some chocolate chip cookies. I already had most of the ingredients, so I really just needed to pick up a few odds and ends like chocolate chips. The recipe calls for 12oz with an option to go all the way to 16. I figured 16 sounded like a nice round number, and made a note to pick up a 16oz pack of chocolate chips. Or two 8oz packs, either would do just fine.

That plan lasted right up until I got to the chocolate chip aisle and discovered that the packs came in such round numbers as 9oz, 10.3oz, 11.5oz, 13oz... seriously?

I picked up 2 packs of 11.5oz so that I could maybe use a pack and a half or so, but I actually ended up only using a single pack. More on that in a bit.

First, let's have a look at how they turned out.

They look pretty damn tasty, and taste pretty damn tasty too.

And here's the "before" picture of the second batch before thy go in the oven to bake.

I went a little more liberal on the salt for this batch.

But salt you say? Since when are chocolate chip cookies topped with salt?

Since I make them, that's when. I took my usual liberties with this fairly standard recipe, mixing things up and modernizing it to my palate. The notable changes being...

First off, I swapped out the mixture of brown and white sugar for all white sugar plus an equivalent amount of molasses. I keep white sugar around, and I keep molasses around, and I just don't care to dedicate cabinet space to other types of sugars. So that was less of a culinary change and more of a convenience change that doesn't actually affect the end result.

Second, I went for an all-butter cookie instead of a butter-shortening mix. Part of this is convenience again, as I don't keep shortening around the house, and part of it is so that I can brown the butter first, which adds a delightful nutty flavour and also skips the step where you spend ages trying to cream the butter and sugar together.

And third, speaking of that nutty flavour, I substituted 25% of the all purpose flour for buckwheat flour, which adds a fantastic earthy, savoury complexity on top of everything else.

Of course, for the finishing touch, we have the salt. The maldon salt comes in fairly huge flakes, and this is important: regular table salt would just dissolve away into the cookie during cooking and wouldn't give you that hit of salinity right when you bite into the cookie. It would just, instead, taste like an oversalted cookie, which wouldn't be great. The flakes of salt take much longer to dissolve though, so they make it through the baking process basically intact, and you get little firecrackers of salinity as you munch on the cookie. It's well worth the extra trouble.

Anyway, cooking these for 11 minutes at 375°f(reedom) yields a cookie that's just soft and toothy in the center with a crispy, lacy caramelized underside. Absolutely perfect.

But looking at these perfectly formed cookies, you might wonder how I got them so uniform? Well, that's simple.

I just eyeballed it with a tablespoon, because this cookie scoop I ordered was dropped off by the Amazon guy right as the last batch was going into the oven. Oh well, next time.