ante up: a new kind of chip

I never really spent time contemplating the chocolate chip cookie. I have my moments when I enjoy them - hot and melty right out of the oven, or Chips Ahoy soaked through with milk, or the giant deli ones with chips stuck all over the top - but they were never on the top of my cookie list. Despite my relative disinterest in the classic treat, I was definitely intrigued upon reading this article (a while ago) in the New York Times about the quest for the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. Even though I'm not a die-hard chocolate chip cookie fan, that article made my mouth water.



Well, as luck would have it, the very shop that the recipe in this article is based on - the very chocolate they recommend - is right downstairs from my office. The new Jacques Torres Shop in Chelsea Market is a dangerous thing, because even though I've always said I'm not a huge chocolate lover, if there is one way to make me want to eat chocolate it would be to open the best chocolate shop in town literally under my nose. The recipe calls for their dark chocolate wafers; flat round disks of chocolate about the diameter of a silver dollar. In place of the classic chip, these wafers melt to create amazing thin chocolate strata all throughout the cookie. You get a bit of melty chocolate in every bite, rather than a disproportionate hunk.

And then, the pièce de résistance, the salt. The salt not only within the batter itself, but the flaky sea salt sprinkled on top of the cookies. The salt that makes the chocolate taste chocolatier, the cookie taste cookier. Salt on desserts, one of my favorite things. Find the recipe HERE.