Making Great Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've become known among friends in our neighborhood as a great baker, though restricted to cookies and pies so far. The last couple times I made chocolate chip cookies I was been told by multiple enthusiastic people that I should open a bakery. This bragging isn't to puff me up in your eyes, readers. I'm building myself up a bit to let you down, to let you know that there's no magic to it and that I just use good tools, a good process, and follow the recipe, with one or two tiny modifications.

Yes, you too can make amazing chocolate chip cookies! Now, how? If you bake, you probably already have some or all of the tools. Here's what you need:

Item 1: Get the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies recipe. It's available here. Yes, we're using the recipe on the bag.

Item 2: Acquire four medium-sized cookie sheets or shallow baking pans. You should ideally be able to fit two of them in the oven side-by-side. This is just to keep the assembly line moving faster, and you can use fewer sheets if you want.

Item 3: Acquire some silicone baking mats. I prefer to use the Silpat brand, but cheaper ones are probably fine. You should have as many mats as there are baking sheets.

Item 4: Acquire some cooling racks. You should have as many cooling racks as there are baking sheets, which allows you to rotate out cooled vs cooling cookies and keep a good assembly line going.

Item 5: Acquire some parchment paper. This is optional, but I use this after the cooling racks, to lay the mostly cooled cookies out on a table to finally come to room temperature.

Now follow the Nestle Toll House recipe, but with two small changes. First, set your eggs out to warm to near room temperature about an hour before you're going to bake. You need to let your butter soften too, so just put them out at the same time. Second, substitute Kosher salt (1.25 tsp) for the regular table salt (1 tsp). This will add just a tiny bit of salt flavor to complement the sweet. I also never add the nuts and just use the extra tablespoon or two of flour indicated at the end of the recipe.

What comes next might be responsible for why my cookies come out so well, or it's just overly complicated--I can't be sure. It could just be the room temperature eggs! In any case, have your cooling racks set up and parchment paper on the table next to them.

Once your first batch of cookies comes out of the oven, place the baking sheets with cookies on cooling racks, then put your next batch in. Let the cookies sit on the sheets and cooling rack for a couple minutes, then gently lift the silicone mat on one side and slide the baking sheet out from under it without damaging the cookies, leaving the silicone mat with cookies on the cooling rack. After another ~6 minutes, lift the cookies off the silicone baking mats. A gentle twist while lifting can help. Place the cookies directly on a cooling rack.

Continue baking cookies and cooling them like this until the cookies fill one cooling rack, then start moving the coolest ones, from the first batch, down onto the parchment paper where they will finish cooling. They shouldn't stick or leave gooey chocolate at this point.

Note when baking: For each batch in the oven, when 1 or 2 minutes are left on the timer, check the cookies. Their edges should be medium brown and the centers just barely starting to brown a bit when you take them out.

I haven't taken the time to experiment, but some combination of warmed eggs, kosher salt, silicone baking mats, and my cooling rack treatment of the cookies after removing them from the oven seems to produce amazing chocolate chip cookies every time.