When King Arthur Baking announced their 2024 Recipe of the Year that promised soft, nutty chocolate chip cookies thanks to browned butter and the novel incorporation of tangzhong…I was intrigued and knew I had to try it! 🍪 We have a good friend who had specifically requested I make him soft chocolate chip cookies, so I was super stoked to find a recipe that it sounds like he’d love.
I use tangzhong all the time when making soft, pillowy breads like milk bread, but I’d never thought to try it in a cookie. This technique could be a game changer for my cookie repertoire! Unfortunately, (spoiler alert!) this particular recipe didn’t blow me away like I hoped it would, so I’m still unsure whether the extra work of making a tangzhong is worth it for cookies. Come take a look at how it went for me, and see if you’d like to try for yourself!
Browning butter
The first step in the recipe is to combine the brown sugar and salt in a bowl. It’s important to have this prepped before browning the butter, because the browned butter goes immediately into the bowl to be combined with the sugar and salt once it’s done. As you can see, I hadn’t planned ahead to soften my brown sugar, so it was rock solid and clumpy! 😅 Don’t worry if yours is also dry and clumpy. It turns out fine – the warm butter will help to melt the clumps.
The recipe says that the butter should brown to a “dark golden brown” in 5-7 minutes on medium heat. If yours seems to be progressing too slowly, feel free to increase the heat and/or cook for longer! I used unsalted Kerrygold butter and browned it on level 7 out of 10 on my induction stove for 13 minutes.
The browned butter went directly from the stove into my bowl of rocky sugar. Thanks to the heat and liquid fat, I was able to break up the clumps fairly easily into a somewhat grainy mixture with my whisk.
Making tangzhong
If you’ve never made tangzhong before, don’t feel intimidated! It’s simply a gelatinous mass of cooked flour and milk, and it’s very easy to make. The trick is to keep stirring it so no areas get overly cooked or dried out. In pastry school, I remember our instructor telling us to stop cooking once it has a texture like pudding. That guideline has never failed me yet!
Once the tangzhong gets whisked into the butter and sugar mixture, the whole thing becomes a very sticky, wet batter.
Mixing the dough
After browning the butter and making the tangzhong, the rest of the cookie dough comes together quickly like any other standard chocolate chip cookie. Just add eggs, vanilla extract, bread flour, and chopped chocolate. Easy! By the time I finished whisking all the additional ingredients in, the brown sugar clumps were no longer perceptible.
The recipe specifies using semisweet chocolate, “preferably 60% to 65% cocoa content”. The chocolate I had on hand was Guittard La Première Étoile 58% Cacao Semisweet Chocolate Wafers, so I used that. I chopped it very roughly, leaving lots of large pieces, because I love getting big layers of chocolate in my cookies. 😋 (Side note: One of my favorite chocolates for chocolate chip cookies is Guittard Coucher Du Soleil 72% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate Wafers…too bad I had run out!)
Once the chopped chocolate was folded in, the dough was ready for a 24-72 hour fridge rest. At this point, the dough smelled heavenly – like caramel or toffee. It was also super sticky!
I covered my bowl and popped it into the fridge to rest for the next 25 hours.
Scooping cookies
The following evening, after a 25 hour fridge rest, I excitedly took my dough out to scoop and bake. While the recipe recommends scooping 85-90g cookies with a muffin scoop, I prefer smaller cookies, so I went with their alternative recommendation of using a large cookie scoop for 50g portions. I used an OXO Good Grips Large Cookie Scoop, which has a 3 tablespoon volume and scooped portions of roughly 55g.
Unfortunately, this is where I had the most challenges. I’ve scooped cold cookie dough plenty of times, but the extreme stickiness of this particular dough made it very difficult to get each cookie back out of the scoop. In fact, it was so difficult to release each cookie that my scoop ended up malfunctioning and getting misaligned! 😣 (This does seem to be a complaint some reviewers have of this particular scoop, so I’m not sure if it was the fault of the scoop or the dough…but I’ve never had it happen before.)
I have to admit I found it very frustrating to scoop all of the cookie dough with a now-broken scoop and a spoon, and the dough stuck to everything it touched. Still, I hoped the end result would be worth it!
Baking & eating
After painstakingly scooping the rest of the cookie dough, I baked 6 cookies on a half-sheet pan at 350ºF for 18 minutes. To my surprise, they spread out super thin while baking, and didn’t brown much on the edges. They turned out a little sweet for my taste, but despite the unattractive flatness, definitely soft and quite chewy, as promised!
I froze the rest of the scooped cookies and tried baking them from frozen on another day. The starting temperature of the dough didn’t seem to make much difference in how they turned out – they still baked up flat at 350ºF. However, at 350ºF convection (more equivalent to 375ºF) for 15 minutes, they came out thicker and crisper on the edges.
Even after adjusting my baking parameters to get the thicker structure and crisp edges I prefer, I found these cookies to have more of a cake- or bread-like texture than I like. The taste was fine, but the flavor didn’t wow me, either. I think the flavor left me disappointed because I had such high hopes based on how good the raw dough smelled. 🥲
Overall, I think this recipe yields a decent cookie…just not exceptional enough for me to want to do all the extra work of browning butter, making tangzhong, and dealing with a super sticky dough! That’s just me, though. Cookie preferences are so individual that you might disagree! If you have a roaring success with this recipe, or another favorite cookie recipe to share, let me know. 🙂
My tips for making this recipe
Freeze scooped cookie dough for later
Cookie dough freezes super well! If you freeze pre-scooped cookie dough well wrapped in the freezer, you can be 15-20 minutes away from eating freshly baked cookies anytime you want. 🍪 If you keep the dough balls in an airtight container, they can keep for many months and still taste great.
I won’t recommend you keep them this long yourself, but my mom dug out some cookie dough I froze for her a year and a half ago and they still baked up nicely! 😱🤣
A toaster oven is awesome for baking up a few fresh cookies for a small group or even just yourself.
Adjust baking parameters for your perfect cookie
As I mentioned in the post, your baking parameters can significantly alter the final cookies even when using the same dough! You can experiment with:
- Starting dough temperature
- Oven temperature
- Bake time
- Position in oven
For example, a hotter oven and colder dough will help you achieve a taller, fatter cookie with less spread. Baking for a shorter amount of time will give you softer, gooier cookies, while baking longer will give you crisper edges. If you’re getting burnt bottoms, you can even insulate the bottom of the pan by using two stacked baking pans! There are tons of different ways to change the results, so if you aren’t happy with your cookies on the first bake, don’t give up. 😊