Chocolate chip cookies are amazing. My wife and I have always had an eye out for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipes. Especially on those days where sometimes you just need a cookie. We recently learned about the Levain Chocolate Chip Cookies. Since then we've watched multiple youtube videos of people trying to re-make this magic. Though we still have yet to try the real thing, my wife and I decided to have a bake-off.
We will start with what looked like the most real Levain Chocolate Chip cookie copycat recipe, then make it even better.
After a long search, and way too many browser tabs open, we settled on the A Bountiful Kitchen Levain Bakery Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe, our "control" recipe. It was good. Real good. But right after taking it out of the oven, I knew it needed a fundamental tweak. And you gotta give them credit because they called it out on their post as well when they say in the recipe notes
"If you have issues with the cookies flattening out, use 1 3/4 cups flour."
What could possibly be better?
- Consistency: By far the most important tweak for me is the cookie’s consistency. The cookies need to be denser, but still fluffy. They need more structure, and to be less flat. Hopefully, a bit more crunch on the outside to counter the fluff on the inside, and (maybe this isn’t consistency) to have a bit more dark / caramelly sweetness to them. Weirdly, despite me wanting them to be dense, I also thought the base recipe was too buttery.
- Walnuts: Something’s up here. I didn’t taste the walnuts in the base recipe.
- Salt: Salt brings out the flavor, and is a hidden gem in chocolate chip cookies. These cookies could use a bit more.
So to be fair - my wife and I have not yet tested the simple change of solely adding additional flour to the control recipe. But I needed to hammer home this consistency problem, so we’re going to make a few changes.
The key variables to my consistency changes are the flour, sugar, baking soda,baking powder, eggs, and the oven. After doing some short research, I learned a few things about cookie consistency. One of my top favorite sources was this gem from Serious Eats and The Food Lab.
The hypothesis: how do we make a good cookie great?
So – how do we achieve these points of improvement to make the perfect Levain Chocolate Chip Cookie? Here's what I came up with:
Consistency
The consistency of the cookie was the most complex change. Here goes!
- Increase flour to increase fluff and reduce flatness
- Use darker brown sugar to make the cookies darker in color, a bit chewier, and increase fluff (reduce flatness).
Bonus - due to its acidity it also lets us drop the baking powder for just baking soda! - Drop the baking powder, increase the baking soda. Baking soda and baking powder are used to achieve a similar goal - make the cookies rise. They’re leavening agents. It's super fun to read about the chemical reactions and their impact on baking. This is a small tweak, but basically baking powder is baking soda + reacting agents that can add unwanted flavor (some sites cite a metallic flavor). Since we’re adding a lot more molasses (which is a reacting agent), it made me think there's no longer a need for the extra agents in the baking powder! I'll plan to follow the ratio recommended by Sallys Baking Edition and go with 1/4 tsp baking soda per 1c of flour, but bump it up a bit more for a bit more rise. We'll drop the baking powder, and go with 3/4tsp baking soda (balanced with the slightly less than 1.5c flour).
Though the effects of this change may have been small, it was one of my more exciting changes due to all of the science going on here 🤓 - Keep the egg ratio: From the Food Lab read, I liked the ratio of 1:1 yolk to white ratio. I thought about tweaking it but kept this as-is.
- Baking: A few things were done here
Chill the dough: A simple tweak to hopefully reduce flattening a bit more. Some say this can increase some flavor (think marinades) though I must admit I’m not sure I’m convinced. Either way seems like a minor tweak that can only help!
Bake longer: I already expected to have to bake longer since the dough will be chilled, but this one surprised me. It needed a lot longer. I was planning on baking for ~14min at 400 degrees, I ended up baking it for closer to 20-25min. One minor issue I hit was the exterior was starting to burn @ around 14m so I took them out early, opened one up, and it was very uncooked. Put it back in for another ~6-10min. After that it was great. To simulate this, next time I’d probably decrease the temp to 350 or 375 and bake for ~20+min. Hopefully, this would reduce the chance of burning the outside while giving enough time to cook the insides.
Walnuts
- Toast the walnuts!!! Something's gotta give here. Initially, I was thinking they need more walnuts, but after discussing with my wife, she had a great idea to try toasting the walnuts and maintaining the same ratio. I LOVE IT. Let's do it.
Salt
- Kosher salt instead of sea salt inside. We're going for a consistent salt flavor throughout the cookie so let's use smaller grains of salt.
- Sea salt on top. But there's still a place for sea salt. Bigger flakes on the top because it looks good and some inconsistency can't hurt here!
The result
Overall I am super happy with the result.
The cookies turned out to be dense, but still fluffy, darker, and have a better ratio of salt, and the walnuts added a perfect level of crunch and flavor.
What would I change? Not much. The result was great and I think I achieved all of the main points of improvement above. I had a few hiccups while baking, so we would need to tweak the baking temperature and duration a bit. Let's try my wife's cookies and see if I want to take any more ideas!
The final recipe
Yields 4x 6oz cookies, make sure to prepare the dough the night before!
Ingredients
- 6tbsp Butter, Melted
- 1/4c Dark brown sugar
- 1/4c Light brown sugar
- 1/4c Sugar
- 1 egg
- 60g Cake flour (about 1/2 cup)
- 105g All-purpose flour (I halved the 1 3/4 cup recommendation, so this is about .875 cups)
- 3/4 tsp Baking soda
- 1/2 tsp Kosher salt
- 1c Toasted walnuts
- 1c (187g) Chocolate Chips
Pro tip: Since the 3 sugars are different combinations of granulated sugar and molasses, you could also just do a 1:1 ratio of dark brown sugar and granulated sugar.
Instructions
- Prepare dry ingredients - add the cake flour, all-purpose flour, baking soda, and salt to a bowl and mix to incorporate.
- Place melted butter, and sugars into a mixing bowl and mix on low until the sugars are mixed and blended with the b, about 1-2 minutes.
- Add the eggs just until incorporated, about another 30 seconds.
- Once eggs are incorporated, while still mixing, add the prepared dry ingredients until mixed together, then stop mixing.
- Pour the walnuts and chocolate chips into the batter all at once, and fold together.
- Using your hands, divide the dough into 4 equal balls about 6 oz each. Place them into a bowl or on a plate, cover them and refrigerate for at least a couple hours or overnight.
~ a few hours later, or the next day ~ - Preheat the oven to 375**
- Place the 4 cookies separately on a pan, still in the ball shape. Bake until cookies start to brown, about 25 minutes.
- The cookies are done when the top is a bit golden and the bottom is also golden.
- Let cool for 15 minutes before serving.
** See the blog for notes about baking. I'm still working out the exact baking times so you may need to use your judgment as to when it's done. Don't worry. After 15min of cooling, I had to put them back in the oven and they still turned out amazing. If you need to re-bake as I did, make sure to add enough time as the cookies will need to come back to temperature (~5 minutes) before they actually start baking again. For reference, I was baking at about 400 degrees for 14 minutes. I then cooled them (as the edges were starting to brown), but the insides were definitely not cooked. I then re-baked them for another ~10 minutes and they came out great. I think reducing the temp and increasing the duration should help solve this. But don't over bake them!
Stay tuned to see how the bake-off panned out!