A longtime food blogger who had grown skeptical of new chocolate chip cookie recipes has endorsed one from Ashley Rodriguez, the baker behind Not Without Salt and the cookbook Date Night In. The blogger wrote that Rodriguez's recipe has become her "new house cookie," a shift after years of trying and largely dismissing other widely circulated versions.
The blogger, who described herself as "cranky in my advanced food blogging age," said most modern chocolate chip cookie recipes trace back to the original Toll House Inn recipe invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield in Whitman, Massachusetts, and published in a 1936 cookbook. She wrote that newer versions often pursue a "better" cookie through added complexity rather than simplicity.
Among the approaches she questioned: recipes requiring cake flour, bread flour, or a combination, which she said seemed likely to average out to all-purpose flour; recipes using whole-wheat flour, which she said she would rather get from toast or grain salads; and recipes calling for expensive Valrhona feves, which she said made the cookies rarely repeatable. She also wrote that browning butter rarely delivers enough flavor in the final cookie to justify the loss of tender chewiness, and that recipes warning against making cookies smaller than coffee-shop size produced "unitextured and dull" results when she made them spoonful-sized.
She also dismissed the popular instruction to rest the dough overnight, writing that it suits only people who plan cookie cravings at least 24 hours in advance, "i.e. nobody I’ve ever been or met."
What sets Rodriguez's recipe apart
Rodriguez's recipe, by contrast, uses no special flour, does not require browned butter, and works whether baked immediately after mixing or scooped from the freezer days later, according to the blogger. It also does not require a specific chocolate; hand-chopping a bar into large chunks is optional, and any brand at any budget works. The recipe does call for three types of sugar, though the blogger wrote that two will suffice and that most bakers likely already have them on hand.
The blogger described the finished cookies as thick with crisp edges, soft but not cakey inside, finished with a faint crunch of sea salt and "absolutely puddled with chocolate ponds."
Rodriguez has also released a packaged Salted Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix, sold through her site. The blogger noted the recipe is featured in a video that she warned may be difficult to resist.
Editorial Notes