After the wedding, things didn't turn out like in this movie. Rather, we came home and fell back to the old standby of chocolate chip cookies. M. and C. had given us some quality chocolate to make use of, so it seemed like the right choice. I pulled out The Science of Good Cooking to see what it had to say on the subject. Never lacking in swagger, the book promised a recipe for the "ultimate" chocolate chip cookies. A perfunctory Google reveals that they also are known as "perfect" in other America's Test Kitchen publications.
The signature twist of this recipe is probably the use of browned butter. Just as the name suggests, such butter is created by heating non-brown butter on the stove until it changes to the target color. The recipe promised that this would produce a nutty, toffelike flavor in the ultimate cookie.
While the resulting cookies were consumed with pleasure, they probably fell short of expectations. I found them a little too flat, and not quite chewy enough. The internet suggests that flatness can be a consequence of butter that melts too soon. Yet, melting the butter right away was the whole point of this recipe!
I suppose that recipes that bill themselves as producing an "ultimate" or "perfect" product will never live up to my expectations -- that's some serious hype.
Says N., "They were still quite tasty".
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