Recipe #8: The $250 Cookie Recipe

Intro

My brother challenged me to bake my way through the New York Times Top 11 Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes, mostly so maybe I would send him some to “taste-test.”

And why not?

I printed all the recipes, scanned the ingredients and spent about $60 on the stuff I did not have, like cake flour and coconut sugar - not including the cookie scoop that I have always wanted and finally bought. I did not buy any super special ingredients. No chocolate feves, no Maldon salt.

The Recipe

So the back story here is that a woman had chocolate chip cookies in the cafe at a Neiman Marcus department store, declared them to be the best cookie she had ever had, and asked for the recipe. Staff at the cafe was happy to accommodate her and for “two-fifty” handed her the recipe. She noticed afterwards that her credit card had been charged $250 for it.

For the record, Neiman Marcus says this never happened.

Yet here we are. And I have to say, this is $250-worth of work for a cookie that, while pretty darn good, is not amazing. Important disclosure: I am not a fan of milk chocolate, or nuts in general, so my bias may be showing.

I am not a milk chocolate person, and generally have little to no milk chocolate on-hand, because - let’s be honest - it’s an inferior product no matter who makes it. However! I just happened to have a bar of Godiva milk chocolate in the cupboard - 3 oz, so I was a bit short but whatever.

Grating milk chocolate with a microplane is…ridiculous, messy, and time-consuming and in the end, I am not sure it made any appreciable difference in the flavor of the cookies (and I don’t think that extra ounce would have mattered either). I used my Zyliss, and kept having to clear out wedged bits of chocolate. Then I switched to my tiny hand microplane, which wasn’t much better or faster.

While grinding oatmeal in a processor is hardly difficult, my thought here was just…”why?” Well, actually, I can guess why - it adds to texture and thickens the dough for a thicker cookie I suppose. Still - an extra step and more equipment to clean for a cookie that is good but not amazing.

For nuts, I used walnuts and chopped them for smaller bits. This is personal preference, since I don’t love walnuts and find small pieces don’t ruin the entire cookie for me.

The dough is tasty but very stiff. I alternated between making these using a one tablespoon scoop, as written, and the 1.5 tablespoon scoop for a little larger cookie. They do not spread much at all, and they also don’t drop much as they cool, resulting in a chubby little cookie.

If I thought this was a better cookie, I might be tempted to use different nuts - almonds or peanuts might be interesting. I also think the addition of dried fruit - raisins, cherries or even cranberries - might improve things, but there is already an awful lot going on in this cookie.

Overall, I was underwhelmed. Like I would never have asked for this recipe at Neiman Marcus, that woman must have never had an excellent chocolate chip cookie before.

The Reviews

Me: Eh. It’s an oatmeal cookie, and not even the best I’ve ever had.