Thomas Keller's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Well I've officially started grad school classes. As a congratulatory gesture, my mom bought me a cookbook I've been wanting for a while: Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery Cookbook. It's a gorgeous cookbook! It's big an glossy and has tons of photos (of both the finished products and the process). The blurbs before the recipes seem to be both interesting and informative, and are all well written. The one problem is, most of the recipes are labor intensive or at least time consuming--it is a cookbook for a patisserie after all. Not that that is a problem in and of itself, but as I mentioned, I'm a grad student now; I don't have a ton of free time. So I couldn't make a sourdough loaf or lime and coconut eclairs. (I can't wait to try both another time).



In the meantime, I figured drop cookies are the perfect quick, easy, and satisfying dessert to make. Plus I have to continue my quest for the best chocolate chip cookie. Like Roland Mesnier, Keller uses molasses in his chocolate chip cookies. I like this for two reasons: 1) molasses (like corn syrup) tends to make an especially chewy, moist cookie and 2) I find that the brown sugar in the UK is not the same as the brown sugar in the US (the dark brown is darker but the light brown is lighter) so adding the molasses directly, rather than via brown sugar translates things to the UK more easily.

These weren't my favorite chocolate chip cookies...I still like my recipe better (although I'm working on some tweaks to mine which may involve molasses or possibly corn syrup as a substitute for some of the sugar to make the cookies a bit chewier.) That said, these were excellent! They had a lovely traditional chocolate chip cookie taste and were chock full of chocolate chips. The texture was satisfyingly chewy. But there was nothing knock-it-out-of-the-park excellent about them. The taste, while very nice, wasn't all that different from a tollhouse cookie and the texture was chewy but not quite the soft, almost under-baked texture that I love. Maybe it's my obsession with chocolate chip cookies (I've tried dozens of variations on chocolate chip cookies and I have yet to combine all the best elements of different recipes into one cookie) but these just weren't amazing. That said, these might be the all around best balance of taste and texture (I tend to get the taste perfect or the texture perfect, but I can't quite get both) but with both elements being very good but neither being exceptional these cookies left me feeling underwhelmed.

I feel rather bad saying this; they were excellent cookies and I'm intrigued by the cookbook which, like Keller's Bouchon Bakery--and Ad Hoc, from what I hear--is rather back to basics when it comes to technique, flavor, and ingredients. I found this recipe easy to follow and simple to execute, as a chocolate chip cookie recipe should be. And the final product was delicious. While I may not make these particular cookies again, I will possibly use them as inspiration for my continued tweaking of my chocolate chip cookie recipe, and I'll certainly try more recipes from this cookbook as soon as time allows!