Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Jacques Torres Came To Visit!

A great article was posted in the New York Times about none other than chocolate chip cookies.  You can read it here.   It talked about some of the great cookies in New York City, including the Jacques Torres Chocolate Chip Cookie (which I recently had the pleasure of tasting on my trip to New York).  One of the things it mentioned was that a lot of bakeries chill their cookie dough before baking.  But we're not talking about for a half hour, oh no, we're talking about 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours.  The different lengths of time for chilling add to the flavor of the cookie and change it for the better.  The article gave a recipe where they adjusted a few things about  Jacques Torres' Secret Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe and added some different baker's ideas and put a few together and came up with a recipe.  Of course I had to try it.  The toughest thing here is having to wait for the dough to chill!   Still, I'm not that crazy, I made one cookie after only letting the dough chill for 15 minutes.  I thought it would be fun to try it with the different chilling times, but since I made the dough at 2 o'clock this afternoon, I'm not planning to get up at 2 a.m. to try the 12 hour dough.  We'll just have to see how the 24 hour dough works out.  But I must say, just the immediate dough made a pretty amazing cookie--and I didn't even have "the best" chocolate.  The article talks about how Jacques uses specially made thin chocolate disks and not chips so that the chocolate is blended and melted into each bite of the cookie.  So I had some Hershey's Bliss Dark Chocolate and a bar of Ghiradelli Semi Sweet Chocolate.  I carefully sliced each Bliss and chopped the bar into pieces. 

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The recipe says to bake the cookies for 18-21 minutes and I baked this one for 17 1/2 minutes.  I don't like my cookies too crispy and would have even liked to have taken it out a minute or so sooner than I did.  But this was a GREAT cookie.  Here is a picture of the Jacques Torres cookie I got on my trip to New York in April---

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And here is the one I made today with the recipe from the New York Times article----

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Pretty close!  It was pretty darn good, especially warm from the oven.  Can't wait to bake the chilled dough tomorrow!

Anna was definitely exactly right on when she named her blog as I was just thinking THIS really is cookie madness!  I'm having a ball, actually gotta go, I'm having a cookie!  ;) Just kidding.  (Seriously, I only ate about 1/4 of the cookie.)

5 comments:

Clumbsy Cookie said...

Looks pretty close Katrina! Can't wait to check later for the chilled ones!
I don't think this is cookie madness yet, it would be if you really had woken up at 2am to bake, lol!

Max and Deborah said...

You really should sell these!! You are doing the scientific research right now of the perfection of your recipe. Very exciting. Very Exciting indeed!
Who said you weren't a scientist. You should get your degree as a food scientist.

Cookie Madness said...

Wow! Yours look almost identical. Mine came out much thicker. They are delicious, but quite thicker, and I made the whole batch by weight rather.

I think it must have had something to do with the insulated cookie sheet.

Judy said...

I really wanted to make these Katrina, but seriously I'm having trouble zippering my shorts. I wouldn't have your will power to only eat 1/4, so I opted out. BTW, I have 2 bags of Hershey's Bliss that I would have partly used for these too. Along with some Ghiradellia Bittersweet. I would have been a happy camper if it weren't for these darn shorts.

Randi said...

Brilliant idea using the Bliss. I always buy candy on clearance after the major candy holidays and use it for baking. I'm about to break into my stash to make some hot fudge sauce.