Levain cookies. Ever heard of them?
I hadn’t until recently, but according to many, they make the best chocolate chip cookies, maybe even the best cookies in general in the US. The bakery is based in New York and I’ve never been. With quarantine I’m not sure when/if I’ll ever get to go. But the obsession easily rubbed off on me.
I’d been watching a lot of cooking and baking videos on YouTube when I stumbled upon my first Levain imitation recipe. When they broke the cookie open to reveal a soft almost gooey inside, with dark melted chocolate chips creating tiny molten waterfalls as they pulled apart, I was sold.
From there I watched 10-20 more and started preparing to bake my own. Which is when things got interesting.
I like to think of myself as an amateur home cook. I can hold my own in your standard home kitchen, I was even on a cooking team in high school. I understand ingredients to an extent and can alter recipe flavors and textures accordingly.
My husband on the other hand, is an engineer. He’s learning his way around a kitchen, but baking is not his go to. As an engineer, he also comes at cooking in a completely different way. Which I learned the moment we watched a YouTube video about how to make the Levain cookies. He started analyzing them at their core. His angle and the way he was viewing the cookies, was not as a whole unit in order to decide whether the imitation was good. He was looking at the ingredients themselves. What they do, how they interact and if that was what the cookie needed.
So, an amateur home cook and an engineer were discussing chocolate chip cookies... and settled on a bake off.
For me, I was ready to full throttle into a recipe I’d found. I’d watched countless videos and it looked the best. For him though, he wasn’t sure that cake flour was really the way to go. Maybe more baking soda would get him the height of the cookie he was looking to achieve? It was on. But in a very friendly “we’re testing hypothesis” way. In fact when weekend one of the bake off finally started, it was actually one of the most collaborative things we could have done.
He ended up finding a recipe that was a good middle ground, from A Bountiful Kitchen. It also, conveniently, took less than an hour to make which allowed us to make a test batch.
We made them together on a random Saturday night, working as a team to measure, mix, weigh and bake the massive 6oz cookies. We talked through the ingredients, the spread, and the caramelization as the cookies baked. Without giving away what we were going to tweak, we talked through the flavors and textures of the cookies as we ate them.
The next weekend we took our notes and faced off.
Stay tuned to the blog to find out what we each changed in the recipe and why. As well as the results on whose cookie was the best imitation of Levain Bakery’s.