Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I like chocolate chip cookies, but I LOVE chocolate chunk cookies.

You may be asking “what’s the difference?”. Well, the difference is the size and shape of the chocolate bits in the cookie.

Chunks give you a varied and more unique chocolate burst for ever bite of cookie you take. I don’t prefer the shape or uniformity of morsels or chips.

Overall, chocolate chunk (or chip) cookies have the same ingredients, but the quantity of those ingredients and the technique of how they are incorporated into the dough is what makes one recipe different from another.

This recipe calls for brown AND white sugar. I wouldn’t recommend using all white or all brown sugar for these reasons: an all white sugar cookie will result in a flat, spread out, snappy cookie and an all brown sugar cookie will result in a soggy cookie with an overpowering flavor.

Of course, there are times where a cookie will require all white or all brown sugar but a chocolate chunk cookie is best made from a combination of the two.

I prefer a 2 : 1 ratio of brown sugar to white sugar. (I used light brown sugar but dark brown is fine too).

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THIS NEXT STEP IS CRUCIAL!

When you add the eggs and vanilla extract to the butter and sugar mixture, you should definitely whip / mix / beat the batter For. A. Long. Time.

And when I say a long time, I really mean it. You will see the color of the batter become lighter the more you mix. This is because you are incorporating air into the mixture which will allow your cookies to not be so dense but still retain their thicker shape. This is also what causes cookies to get those beautiful crackles in them.

When you think you’ve mixed enough, mix for a little more time! You’ve made it when the batter turns into a pale brown color as opposed to a light brown color. (Refer to the images below)

(Note at no point is a hand mixer – or a stand mixer – required, but it takes longer to get from ‘light brown’ to ‘pale brown’ when you’re doing it with a hand whisk)

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Next, you’re going to add in the flour, salt, and baking soda.

It’s at this stage that I would recommend you put the hand mixer aside (or stand mixer if you’re using one) and swap to a spatula.

I say this for two reasons. Reason number one: it’s much harder to get the dough out from inside the whisk. The second (and More Important) reason is that it’s incredibly easy to overwork the dough. Which you definitely do not want to do.

What’s wrong with overworking the dough? Well, when you add flour to the dough, you’re introducing gluten. The more that you mix the flour, the more the gluten bonds develop and the tougher your cookie turns out.

And nobody wants a tough cookie.

Mix the dry ingredients until the flour is just incorporated!

As far as the ‘chocolate chunk’ portion of the cookie goes, I prefer to get baker’s chocolate in bar form rather than morsel or chip form.

The reason I like to do this is that I love having different shapes of chocolate in my cookies. The chocolate flavor is more pronounced in the sense that chunks tend to blend into the cookie better than chips do.

When using bar chocolate, even though the chocolate is perforated into the rectangular pieces, cut the bar on both diagonals to ensure that each piece of chocolate is a unique shape but around the same size.

I prefer using semi-sweet chocolate, but any dark chocolate over 60% cacao will do!

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Refrigerate the dough for At Least 30 minutes after mixing the chocolate in. Why? This allows the butter to harden before you bake it which helps the dough not spread too flat while cooking. This also makes it easier to measure and roll the dough into balls before you bake them.

I am a huge advocate of measuring my dough by weight before baking. I do this because I want every cookie to be identical and to ensure that the baking time is perfect every time.

For this dough, 1.6 ounce balls will get you 24 cookies. (If you’re doing it by hand it’s no smaller than a ping-pong ball and no larger than a golf ball.) You can bake all of them the day you make the batter or you can store them pre-rolled in a zip-lock bag for whenever you crave cookies.

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Storage life is about 1 week in the fridge and 6 months in the freezer! (If you don’t eat them by then!) If you freeze them, I suggest adding another minute to the baking time.

For the ideal bakery-style cookie I would recommend 10 minutes. But for those slightly underdone ooey-gooey cookies I would go for 8 minutes.

You can enjoy those chocolate chunk cookies with warm or cold milk or even with a dollop of ice cream on top!