---
title: '10 Levels of Chocolate Chip Cookies'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=dzw6JO-yz34'
video_id: 'dzw6JO-yz34'
date: 2026-07-19
duration_sec: 2804
channel: 'Binging with Babish'
---

# 10 Levels of Chocolate Chip Cookies

> Source: [10 Levels of Chocolate Chip Cookies](https://youtube.com/watch?v=dzw6JO-yz34)

## Summary

This video explores ten levels of chocolate chip cookies, from the worst store-bought options to an ultimate homemade version. The host, Babish, demonstrates techniques like browning butter, aging dough, and using premium ingredients to elevate the classic cookie.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to 10 Levels** [00:06] — Babish introduces the concept of exploring 10 levels of chocolate chip cookies, starting from the worst to the best.
- **Level 1: Keebler Soft Batch** [01:49] — Keebler Soft Batch cookies are rated the worst commercially available cookie, with few chocolate chips and a pale, pasty texture. They are described as 'budget funeral' cookies.
- **Level 2: Slice and Bake Dough** [03:36] — Pillsbury slice and bake dough is tested. Raw dough has an odd flavor, but baked cookies are a definite improvement over Level 1, with a warm, acceptable texture.
- **Level 3: Bagged Mix** [05:46] — A bagged cookie mix is tested with both butter and shortening. Butter yields a crunchier cookie, while shortening gives a softer texture. Surprisingly, tube cookies taste better than the bagged mix.
- **Level 4: Toll House Recipe** [08:08] — The original Toll House recipe from 1938 is made. It produces a perfect, classic chocolate chip cookie with minimal effort, described as the prototypical standard.
- **Level 5: Upgraded Toll House** [10:40] — Upgrades include browning butter, using bread flour for chewiness, dark brown sugar for flavor, an extra egg yolk for richness, and chopped chocolate for texture. Chilling the dough improves spread and texture.
- **Level 6: Aged Cookie Dough** [16:11] — Aging dough for 3 days in the fridge evaporates moisture, hydrates flour, and develops flavor. The aged cookie has better spread, darker color, and a chewy, gooey texture.
- **Level 7: Kitchen Sink Cookies** [18:55] — Adding walnuts, hazelnut coffee, pretzels, kettle chips, caramel corn, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch to the dough creates a texturally exciting cookie with varied flavors in every bite.
- **Level 8: Expensive Ingredients** [22:35] — Using premium ingredients ($30 chocolate, $15 flour, $36 vanilla) results in a cookie costing $56 per batch. The expensive cookie has glassy, crunchy edges and fudgy center, but the lesson is that purpose-driven ingredients matter more than cost.
- **Level 9: Levain Bakery Copycat** [26:52] — Recreating Levain Bakery's giant, gooey cookies using cold butter, cake flour, and cornstarch. The cookies are baked at 375°F on convection for even browning, resulting in a crunchy exterior and raw dough interior.
- **Level 10: Ultimate Cookie** [31:20] — The ultimate cookie uses toasted flour, caramelized white chocolate, brown butter, aged dough, and a mix of chocolates. After multiple attempts, the pan-banging technique helps achieve the desired spread and texture.

### Conclusion

The video demonstrates that chocolate chip cookies can be elevated through techniques like browning butter, aging dough, and using quality ingredients. The ultimate cookie is a personal preference, but the journey from store-bought to homemade is rewarding.

## Transcript

chocolate chip cookies. Are there three finer C words in the English language? >> Not that I can say here at the beginning of a video. >> I mean, that is an awesome word and only
Europeans can say it, but I'm okay with that because we have chocolate chip cookies. They have chocolate flavored biscuits. My ass. [Music]
This episode is sponsored by Challenge Dairy, the go-to butter in my kitchen. it, has innovated the way we use butter. chunks, so you can throw it into your noodles, your pan sauce, or your
potatoes. Obviously, butter is the key ingredient to great cookies, so you're episode. When you go for quality ingredients, you get quality results. challenge and to find yourself some butter cubes, scan the QR code or head
to the description. Chocolate chip cookies. One of God's little reminders that see, not everything is awful. So, how are we going to explore 10 levels of chocolate chip cookies? Are there even 10 levels of chocolate chip cookies? I'm
is. And we're going to start with the very worst one. Keebler soft batch cookies you will find are the very worst chocolate chip >> Why? >> Because they're Watch the Watch the
clip. You'll find out. >> I'm about to say when I taste tested all the commercially available chocolate chip cookies, I gave this a one and it chip cookies, I gave this a one and it was the only one achieved by a non
sugarfree or gluten-free or whatever alternative cookie. This is the only straight up cookie that got a one. It is the very lowest expression of the medium. Let's see how far we're going to climb.
Number one, they look awful. They don't have enough chocolate chips. I think I counted an average of three to four per cookie. And something to do with their recipe, with how they bake them up, with how they're prepared and sliced. You
very seldomly see chocolate chips on the surface. There are small exceptions, but for the most part, you're getting these pale, pasty pucks of pathetic uh pedantic pillowy soft chocolate chip cookies. Let's dig in.
cookies. Let's dig in. [Music] a chocolate chip cookie. One of the worst, if not the worst, expression of
the medium that I can possibly think of. These are the kinds of cookies that you get at a budget funeral. I'm talking like nobody liked this this guy. No family or just neighbors. They're like, "This guy was there. I don't know. Get
some Keebler Chips Deluxe Soft Batch, some big drums of coffee, and and and call it a day." That's what it tastes like. So, be kind to your neighbors. Put proper service. Don't leave that on your loved ones. And just don't ever get
these, please. Slice and bake cookie dough is a novel enough idea. Homemade cookies in a snap, plus cookie dough that you can eat raw. But are they any good? For more, we go
to me now. Level two, or should I call it level tube? the stuff in the tube that more often than not you're eating raw in the bathtub reading a Nicholas Sparks novel. This is basically the same stuff as the packaged cookies, almost
the same exact ingredients, uh that you get to, you know, either eat raw, which according to directions, make the smallest cookies in the world. So, let's give both of those options a try. Going to use my Babish Shears available now on
Amazon in stores to to open the tube. Let's see if this tastes the same as it did when I was in college.
I remember it not being terribly good, but that's got some weird flavor in it. cookie dough like this and just eating it with a spoon or with your filthy little fingers, it's kind of nice. Baking directions. Heat oven to 350° F.
Spoon dough by tablespoonfuls 2 in apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 12 to 15 minutes or until edges are golden brown. Cool 1 minute. Remove from cookie sheet. Time to remove the cookies. And a good rule to follow is if you can rotate
the cookies without breaking them, they are ready to move. If they start to squish or squish or feel like they're going to fall apart, let them rest a good idea to remove the cookies from the cookie sheet, depending on your recipe,
as quickly as possible. Because the cookie sheet is still hot, it will continue cooking them and it will affect your final texture. All right, folks. There it is. A tubular cookie. It looks mighty fine. Like that doesn't look bad
really the only two things that we have to worry about. [Music] Definite improvement on raw. That odd the background. And something about a warm cookie, even if it's the lowest
it." Turns out the floor on chocolate chip cookies pretty high. Let's go a little higher. >> Okay, bagged mix. Is this why you always say let's get that bag, Babish fam? >> In a manner of speaking, yes. I am
always trying to get that bag, no matter what bag it might be. Preferably a bag full of money. But if it must be a bag of cookie dry mix, so be it. Level three
takes things from tubes to bags because this is effectively the Pillsbury cake mix but for chocolate chip cookies. Did that make any sense? No, I understand. I've never seen these before. I might not have ever just
visually registered them in the supermarket. But we'll see how they turn out. Now, there is a tip on the back of this bag saying you can substitute the achieve different results. You know what? I'm going to do both. I'm going to
do half a batch with butter, half a batch with shortening to find out exactly what kind of difference it makes. I already know, but I want you to know. Baking instructions. Set your oven to 375° Fahrenheit. Butter should be
completely softened or slightly melted. Combine cookie mix. Soften butter and egg in a medium bowl. Mix until soft dough is formed. Form dough by rounded teaspoons. Teaspoons. That's That's like this much, which I think is both cruel
and unusual. So, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to make normalsized cookies. Step three, bake at 375° F for 8 to 10 minutes or until edges are set. removing from baking sheet. There you have it. We have our cookies baked with
can see, we have a kind of cracked up appearance on the shortening cookie. The butter one looks a lot more normal in terms of its texture. And the shortening we put a layer of sugar on top. Let's start with the butter one. It's more of
a control. It's already pretty stiff. Like, it's still slightly warm, so it it has some give to it, but it's like toward the edges, it's got crunch to it. Next, we have the shortening cookie, which is so much
softer. It just yields immediately. The edges, while stiffer, are not crunchy like the butter one. See what they taste like. [Music] Don't ask me how. I don't know how the
tube cookies taste better. They look better and they taste better. It's crazy cuz it has some actual ingredients in it. But yeah, this is level two, not level three. Sorry if that's confusing. Yeah, this is how you discover. You try.
And I tried and I discovered that this tastes bad. >> For who does the house toll? >> It toll for Nestle who cometh for your soul because they think that water is not a human right. Do you need water to
bake their cookies? No. And that's that's how they get you. No matter how you might feel about Nestle, Toll House is the original chocolate chip cookie recipe. It was invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1938 at the Toll House Inn
in Massachusetts. This is basically the prototypical and I would say standard for chocolate chip cookies. Original Toll House chocolate chip cookies. Toll House chocolate chip cookies. Preheat oven to 375° F. In a small bowl,
combine flour, baking soda, and salt. In a large mixing bowl, beatet butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract until creamy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in flour mixture
gradually. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop onto ungreased baking sheets by rounded tablespoons. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes. That's a beauty right there. Look at that. Even the bottom looks per Look at
that. That's crazy. It looks perfect. The prototypical watermark for chocolate The prototypical watermark for chocolate chip cookies, the toll house. It's a perfect chocolate chip cookie. I'd say that was probably 20 minutes of
of effort. Really pays dividends. Like, it's remarkable how much better this tastes than the stuff out of the box or the bag or the tube. They're perfect. If you grew up eating these, you're a kid again. And isn't that what we're all
trying to accomplish? It's just like childlike wonder. I almost lose the motivation to improve on this because it's just so damn classically good. But look at all the ways that you can improve the standard chocolate chip
cookie recipe. Long, hot, [Music] slippery,
trying to say? [Music] >> For whom does the house toll plus? >> What Brad's trying to say is, can we upgrade toll house? A toll house plus, if you will. And for whom does that toll
house plus bell toll. >> Yeah. >> Level five toll house upgraded. In what
ways can we upgrade the basic almost perfect boilerplate chocolate chip cookie? First thing we can do is brown our butter. This is a 5 to 10 minute process that is going to add a ton of rich nutty flavor to your cookies. It's
going to darken their color. It's going to give them this wonderful toasty aroma and it's going to translate directly into the quality of the cookie. All we have the same amount of butter here, half a cup, that I'm going to place into
a small saucepan. I'm just going to gently cook it. So, when it starts getting a little swirly like that, that means you can either reduce the heat or give it a swirl. You can see that the milk proteins, you see these little
white flexcks that are starting to emancipate themselves from the rest of the butter. And now, as you can see, the milk proteins have fully separated. They've browned beautifully. There is not a pale one amongst them. Now,
Challenge Dairy has 80% butter fat. When you brown butter, all the the water cooks off, which means that you have reduced the weight of the butter. We're going to both add that back and halt the cooking, preventing the milk solids from
burning from carryover heat. So, we're going to add that 20% of water back in the form of ice. Adding just under 23 g of ice to our butter. That's going to sizzle a little bit. Just mix it around. We're going to take this off the heat
browning too much. Now, basically, we want this to solidify to the point of Sometimes brown butter, even if you add the liquid back in form of ice, it still I'm going to throw this in the fridge just until it solidifies a little bit,
not cold, just a solid instead of a liquid. The next way that we're going to upgrade our cookies is in the dry mix. And it's a pretty simple addition. We're And it's a pretty simple addition. We're swapping out about 30% by weight of our
flour with bread flour. Why are we doing this? Bread flour has a higher protein content and protein leads to more gluten development. And normally this is going to have a tough cookie." I beg to differ. That extra gluten development
results in a chewier cookie. And I like a really chewy cookie. I like it to be fudgy and dense, crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. Contrastingly, if you want really tender, you know, your teeth just fall right through kind of
cookies, use cake flour. That has even less protein overall. For this half batch, I've got 100 g of allpurpose with 40 g of bread flour. The same/ teaspoon each baking soda, kosher salt, tiny whisk these guys until homogenous. Our
next upgrade is with the sugar. We're doing the same exact 75 g of granulated white sugar, but for the brown sugar, we're going dark brown. Dark brown sugar has a higher molasses content. This is going to have three effects. It's going
more flavor in the form of like caramelly molasses notes. And it's going to give it a denser, chewier texture, which personally I love. So, our next upgrade is going to be the egg by adding a little more egg yolk specifically. I
have one extra egg yolk. You want to add the whole thing for a full batch, but again, we're doing a half batch here. So, I'm going to add about half of this whole egg yolk. This is going to add a lot of richness, flavor, fat, and give
it an even better texture. There's brown butter ready for deployment. Of course, the same half teaspoon of vanilla extract, which I am clearly eyeballing. Beat these guys together until fluffed and latte brown. Now, the last and final
upgrade is going to be the chocolate. We are, of course, adding the requisite chocolate chips. I'm not going to add the full cup, though, something else. So, what I have here is a bar of semieet chocolate. The reason
we can chop it. We want to chop some of it into big old chunks, but then some of it we also want to chop super finely into almost shavings. What this is going to do is not only give us de facto chocolate chunks. It's going to give us
all these powdery little sliver bits which are going to almost emulsify into the dough to some degree and it's going to create little streaks, little streaks these guys are headed into the oven for probably a little bit less time just
because uh I'm just guessing. Just guessing. All right, here come our upgraded toll house. Our original toll house versus upgraded toll house. And I don't even need to taste it to tell you there's going to be a different taste.
characteristic to it. It it tastes more roasty and caramelly. Just got so much more complex flavor. And it does indeed taste chocolatier. It's because of those start chewing, they hit your tongue. I think because of the brown butter and
the brown sugar, this is having a higher spread factor. And I do think that it's going to look a lot better after it's sent in the fridge. So, I'm going to it's been in the fridge for at least an hour. Hell yeah. Look at those huge
differences made by different treatments of this dough. Simply by chilling it for 90 minutes before baking. More variation in color. We've got more height. Uh and we've got a way better texture. Little fridge time. Goes from this kind of
weird cookie to a like bakery level cookie. You would buy this for an elevated price at a coffee shop. You would. I would. We would. So, we've seen can do, but what about a whole lot more time in the fridge, if you know what I
mean? More time in the fridge. Literally, more time in the fridge. Literally, more time in the fridge. Level six, aged cookie dough. >> For whom does the aged house told? Rule of three. You said rule of three in the
>> And you abused that. What makes you think that I'd be okay with it now? >> Because this is actually the third time. >> You got me there. What we're going to explore now is what happens when you age cookie dough. For
popular secret ingredients of the last 10 years, time. On your right, you'll see a freshlymade batch of cookie dough. On your left, you'll see the exact same
recipe, same formula, same ingredients after 3 days in the fridge. So, right color difference, and that's really all going on. Over the past 3 days in the fridge, moisture has evaporated from the
concentrated in that way. The flour has fully hydrated, which is going to give fully hydrated, which is going to give us a fudgier kind of meltier core. And enzymes that work with sugars or
up more beautifully. And I'm going to bake them side by side so you can see bake them side by side so you can see just how much better cookie it do. And there you have it. 3 days in the fridge versus straight into the oven. Right off
the bat, you can see that we have better spread. We have a darker, more caramelly color. We have a better looking texture. It looks like almost bubbly and oily as opposed to this one, which looks really flat, matte, and full of shhat.
It's a warm chocolate chip cookie. What am I, a monster? But it does taste like the standard chocolate chip cookie. Your toll house, your toll house, your toll house.
cookies. Planning was never my strong suit either. But god, the rewards are great. Even one night in the fridge is going to have a pronounced, visible, tasteable effect. The butter just explodes out of it. You know what I
good cookie and you you can you can feel the the all the fat in it more immediately. Like it almost just bursts out of it. And even though it's thinner than the other cookie, even though it's thinner by almost 50%, it's soft, it's
gooey, and it's got a nice chew to it around the edges. We have crunch and chew happening around the outside of the cookie. It's a textural wonderland. I've used that phrase before. It's a textural discovery zone. You have anybody else go
to Discovery Zone growing up? There's no question that this is a roundly better cookie than unrefrigerated. [Music] [Music] Perfect.
>> Common misconception. There's no actual sink in kitchen sink cookies. What we're is we're actually referring to is the whole kitchen sink. It's a saying. It's a an idiom. So, for level seven, here we have our beautiful, perfect chocolate
butter, chocolate chips, and chunks, and it's been aged overnight in the fridge. Adding anything to this would not just be wrong, it would be disrespectful.
Now, I don't want to upset any purists, so we just have some walnuts here that them a little bit of dry heat before adding them to the cookies is going to Just going to chop these up so there aren't too many big hunks and add them
to the dough. Now, we can and probably should stop here, but my little secret ingredient in my chocolate chip cookies is a little bit of hazelnut coffee. just finely ground stuff. So, you're going to want to get the whole beans so you can
get like an espresso fine brine. If you get the preg groundown stuff, it's going are just going to make your cookies look speckled instead of just adding to the color overall. And I mean, as long as we're here, we might as well add some
rubric, a little bit of heath pieces, pretzels, and kettle chips are always a great hit of salt and oil and crunch. Maybe just a little bit of caramel corn. And that's all we're going to add. Plus a little
all we're going to add. Plus a little bit of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Look at that. Oh man, I love loading up my chocolate chip cookies with everything. Now, if you're adding pretzels and popcorn and chips and stuff, make sure that you're adding it after the dough
there with the dough, it's going to absorb moisture. It's going to lose its much to the party as it would if you just mix it in fresh. Okay, here is our fully loaded cookies. They're armed, they're dangerous, and they're at large.
question. Do these still qualify as chocolate chip cookies?
they have to be some of the most beautiful cookies I've ever made. They all the stuff that I put in them, but they're wrinkled in just the right ways. These are going to be the most texturally exciting, interesting, and
let's face it, arousing cookies that have ever been experienced. have ever been experienced. [Music]
imagine. Crunchy, chewy, melty. Every bite is a little bit different. It's magic. The original till house It's magic. The original till house cookie is undoubtedly a classic. It is a
cookie is undoubtedly a classic. It is a near-perfect food item. But this, it's not that it goes beyond perfect. It's that it is almost re redefineses what per perfect is. It challenges you to take in its entirety.
to take in its entirety. No two bites are the same. So yeah, not sure if this is still a chocolate chip cookie, but if it is, it's my favorite chocolate chip cookie in the whole wide world.
So, you've made cookies with three C's, but in this one you added a fourth cash. safe? >> Not at all, Bradley. But does it make it better? Level eight. Cookies so expensive they made the top two buttons
on my shirt disappear. Did you just notice that? It's the next day. I'm wearing a different shirt. These chocolate fes were $30 for 8 o. These chocolate chips out of Portland, New York, while they did not list their
weight, I believe were around $18. This tipto flour was like $15 for 2 lb. The dozen eggs from which this egg hails costed very nearly $14. This jar of Neielson Massie vanilla bean paste is 36 bucks for 4 oz. I will say this one's
matter of these two chocolate bars. These bars are 2.64 oz each or 75 g and they costed $26 each. For reference, they costed $26 each. For reference, that's 35 a gram. Every bite of one of
bucks. So, what happens when we take these supposedly elevated ingredients and apply them to the standard toll house recipe? I'm asking, do you know? No. Then I guess we have to find out. So, I'm
giving all these expensive ingredients the exact same toll house treatment. I have to try these though. So, this is the very expensive milk chocolate chips. I'm not a big milk chocolate guy. Let's see what happens. It's really good. What
do they taste like compared to the toll house? Wow. The toll house have a much cheaper flavor, but it is a much more powerful, prevalent flavor. So, this can definitely not be our only source of chocolate. We need the dark stuff in
there to bring some punch, some acidity, and some, you know, chocolate. expensive toll house. A normal batch of these cookies will run you about $6
total for ingredients. This guy clocked just shy of $56. So,
to kind of shove in there a little bit. I'm also only going to do half of these. against the toll house, it should be able to stand on its own two feet able to stand on its own two feet without any fancification of form. All
right, these look great. It's not just because of the chopped chocolate in it was aged in the fridge. All right, let's take a look at Toll House versus the Toll estate. So, you can see that having chopped chocolate definitely does
it a lot of favors. It's got these kind of channels and rivers of chocolate throughout. So, let's see what the flavor diff is like. flavor diff is like. Totally different texture. It is glassy,
crunchy around the edges and fudgy and chewy in the center the way I like it after the dough has been aged in the fridge. But I swear to God, I didn't age this freaking dough. You know what I think it is? Is the flour. This flour.
13 g of protein per 100 g of that's like bread flour. This is on the high end of the protein content. And apparently it's more coarsely mil than normal flour. So I think that might have caused the butter to not fully incorporate into the
dough as much so that it kind of separated and fried creating these separated and fried creating these really nice crispy crunchy edges. Man, that's cool. Science is cool. I mean, this isn't science, but it's cool. So,
it must be science. So, what did we learn from the expensive cookie? Not that more expensive ingredients make a better cookie, but more purpose-driven ingredients create a better cookie. So, a mixture of different kinds of
chocolate chopped and chips. So, you get all them kinds of textures and flavors. all them kinds of textures and flavors. And a higher protein flour, bread flour, makes for a chewier, fudgier kind of cookie with nice crispy lacy edges. So,
go with bread flour. Just make cookies with bread flour. Many moons ago, I referred to Lava and cookies as a thinking man's cookie. What
does that mean? I actually have no idea. Really, what it is is a gorging man's cookie because it's a giant softball of melted cookie dough with an eggshell of
crispy cookie on the outside. And eating one is a singular experience. By that I mean you can really only eat one and you have to try very very hard. On to level 9 or should we call it level because we're going to make the cookies from
Lavven Bakery. A correctly famous New York City bakery with 20 locations chocolate chip cookies which are basically a giant snowball of cookie dough with a barely baked shell of cookie around it. So how do we recreate
these cookies? I have spent years trying to recreate them myself and so has the internet at large. It's one of the most popular copycat cookie recipes that exists. Uh, and our own Alvin Joe has pioneered a damn near perfect recipe to
we're going to do. One of the biggest barriers to entry with these cookies is temperature control. You want cold butter, which we've done before, but you want to keep it cold. Normally with cold butter, you need to like, you know, beat
to mix it with the sugars. In this case, much by beating it like that. So, we basically need to mix it very slowly and carefully with the sugar, keeping everything as cold as possible, I think,
follow Alvin's recipe to the letter. And if it doesn't work out, it's his fault, if it doesn't work out, it's his fault, not mine. We have some refrigerator cold challenge cubes. I only need full cup. I'm going to cut it into some small
cubes. Going straight into the stand mixer with the 400 g of white sugar. We're creaming that together very slowly at first. We don't want to warm it up. bit more. And just want to get this to the point where it's creamy.
butter. So let's start adding eggs. Cold eggs. Let's dump one of those bad boys eggs. Let's dump one of those bad boys in there. Once it's in, add the next.
Okay, it's in. So, I'm going to add 2 tsps of vanilla. Vanilla paste is slightly less vanillay than vanilla extract. So, I generally do twice what teaspoon of vanilla extract, add two teaspoons of this stuff. It will affect
the texture of your cookie. I think positively. So now I have a mixture here of 180 g of allpurpose flour mixed with 173 g of cake flour, 2 tsps of kosher salt, and a shocking I would say an almost upsetting uh 1 and 1/2 teaspoons
of corn starch. Very curious to see what role that plays in it. That's got it there. Now we got some stuff sticking, so we got to scrape down stuff sticking, so we got to scrape down the bowl. One cup of semieet, one cup of
dark chocolate, cup and a half of walnuts. as much as I might oppose them. walnuts. as much as I might oppose them. Oh yeah.
Okay, we're measuring out, if you can believe it, 170 g chunks. Boom. Three big old balls, which I'm now going to cover in fridge for 1 hour and then into a 400°ree oven for about 10 minutes. Okay, as somebody who's eaten a lot of
lavend, these certainly look the part. They didn't brown as evenly as I would not to cook them through. There's still dough on the inside. You want to sort of brown them on the outside. So, I think what I'm going to try is a slightly
lower temperature, like 375, 380 on convection, and see what that does. All right. Convection at a lower temperature definitely created some more even browning. We got more browning on top. This looks really reminiscent of
the proper genuine article. True to form, this is just packed with chocolate chips and a nice crunchy sort of exterior.
Hats off, Alvin. You did it. This is a Loveven cookie through and through. I don't know how this isn't a major health and safety hazard, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. So, with Love being one of the objective great
chocolate chip cookie experiences of all time, how do we go up from there? What time, how do we go up from there? What if that's level 9? What is level 10?
Level 10. Level 10. This is where we pull out all the stops. I'm using all years and over the course of filming this episode. First up, the flour. We have here 170 g of allpurpose flour, 90 g of bread flour, and I'm going to place
them on a rim baking sheet. Mix them up a little bit, spread them out, and whether you like it or not, we're going to toast this flour at 350° F for about 25 minutes, stirring it every 5 minutes until it's lovely, toasty, golden brown.
flavor to our dough. It's going to bring some nuttiness, some toastiness. The more we can layer that in there, the more respplendant our cookie is going to be. All right, it's been about 30 minutes. We've stirred every 5 minutes.
As you can see, there's a non-dramatic but nonzero color change. Definitely a really the big thing you're going to notice is smell. It smells like nuts. completely. You don't want to dump hot flour into our cookie dough. Now, using
multiple chocolates obviously amps up and diversifies flavor, but I'm going to do something a little controversial. White chocolate. I'm not a big white chocolate guy, but we're not just going to add white chocolate. We're spreading
this stuff out. And we're putting this guy in a 275° Fahrenheit oven for about 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. What this is going to give us is caramelized white chocolate, which is fabulous. And this is where it gets a
little tricky because as it really caramelizes, it starts to it starts to caramelizes, it starts to it starts to become like chunky and clunky. Sometimes this smooths out of its own accord, but it doesn't look like it's doing that. So
instead, we should be able to make short work of it with a food processor. You do not need to like white chocolate to like this stuff. Oh man, that's gorgeous. cookies, but there will be these like big streaks of it. I think it'll look a
certainly not tempered, so I don't know if we can expect it to solidify snappy or shiny. So, if you find that it's still kind of fudgy or or you know, not quite chocolate consistency, uh you can throw it in the fridge and wait till
it's really solidified before chopping it up. Now, on to the dough. We have our beautiful brown butter that's now been chilled and solidified. Now, as usual, we're going to cream the butter together with our sugars. 250 g of dark brown,
100 g of white sugar. I'm also going to add our 2 tsp of vanilla paste.
Now we have two large eggs that I'm going to add one at a time. Scrape down. going to add one at a time. Scrape down. [Music]
flour, got our usual teaspoon of baking soda, a tablespoon of kosher salt, tablespoon of finely ground hazelnut coffee, and then you might have noticed that we're going with a little bit less flour. You probably didn't, but that's
because we're adding 50 g of buckwheat flour. It looks great. It's going to add like a darkness to the situation. Add the dries to the sort of wetss and mix the dries to the sort of wetss and mix to combine.
cookie dough. I'm going to try some. That's insane. Between the hazelnut coffee, the toasted flour, and the brown butter, it tastes It tastes like toffee. butter, it tastes It tastes like toffee. I've never tasted such a rich, complex
because I've never made this specific iteration. So now this guy needs to age in the fridge 3 days. I want to do the maximum amount. Any more than that and returns. In fact, I just happen to have some right here cuz this is TV. So we
got our aged cookie dough here. And I'm going to break it up into the bowl cuz I do want to keep it, you know, cool. I'm going to start with the same mix of dark chocolate and semieet chocolate chips. Roughly a/2 cup each. Now I'm doing a
whole 4 oz bar of bittersweet baking chocolate. And of course our caramelized white chocolate probably 4 oz. Now as much as I love to put a whole bunch of other stuff in my chocolate chip cookies, I kind of want to keep this
purist. I want to keep this just like this is a chocolate chip cookie specifically. It's probably going to put up a bit of a fight. Oh yeah. You don't also don't want to make everything fly out.
I'm going to see how it behaves cold. I do want that kind of variation of color, which cold dough really is good with. Here we go, folks. The ultimate chocolate chip cookie is headed into the oven. 375 for 12 to 15 minutes. We'll
oven. 375 for 12 to 15 minutes. We'll see. All right. So, couple issues here. end cookies, but they're not. and I'd rather them be a little bit flatter. The other issue I'm having is the color. Like they these look healthy. They look
I think we might be able to solve both problems at once. As you can see, the aged cookie dough was like twice as dark as the one that we made today. There's so much complexity happening with the flavor already that I wonder if it needs
the overnight in the fridge. So, only one way to find out. All right, here is our Alakart room temperature cookies. and they've kept right. They don't behave right. They're just not right. And it's 10:00 on a on a
Saturday night. So, I think I need to call it. Normally, this is the part where I beat myself up pretty good. But, I'm going to remind myself this is my first time making this recipe. That tomorrow is another day to try again,
and that we will get it right. We're at level 9 and a half. So, I'll see you guys tomorrow. Level 10 cookies, take two. It's been 5 days and more than 40 hours since beginning this episode. I forgot to trim my mustache this morning,
so it's tickling my lips. And I clocked my head really hard on the corner of the freezer yesterday. But here's a fun fact. I don't bruise. So instead of it looking like the way it feels, it just looks like a pimple. So I'm doing good.
We're going to take another crack at level 10 cookies. So for level 10 attempt, I'm going to change the ratios a bit. I now have 175 g of white sugar a bit. I now have 175 g of white sugar and 200 g of dark brown. Dark brown
prevents spread. It gives a great color and great flavor obviously, but white sugar helps spread. So, upping the ratio in the hopes that it gives me a little more. Now, for the toasted flowers, I used the same ratio of allpurpose to
bread flour, but I swapped the buckwheat for spelt. Very similar, you know, nutty, nice flavor profile, but it's more brown than black. So, it's going to lend a nicer color instead of making it look kind of graywashed. Now, I am
lowering the salts a little bit because I want to add some flaky finishing salt. So, we're down to 2 tsp of kosher salt. I'm upping the baking soda. This is both going to help browning and it's going to help spread to one teaspoon. My finely
ground hazelnut coffee. One tspoon's worth. So, now we're going to add that. [Music] That's weird. Oh, okay. What I have here are some little specks of flour. I should have
sifted it. This Those are going to cause problems. They're going to be visible and they'll be gross. Okay, I don't see anymore. As I continue to manipulate Yeah, I don't see any. So, I think we're cool. So, for chocolate, I'm going with
15 oz of total chocolate. So, I'm doing five, five, five. Five semieet chocolate chips, five chopped dark chocolate, and five of our caramelized white chocolate. Let's see how these guys spread out in the oven.
And they're still puff balls. Um, this has got to be one of two things. One, I probably way overdeveloped the gluten when I beat up the cookie dough. So, I'm this time. The other thing I'm concerned about is the hydration of the dough. It
is rather a dry cookie dough. like you can pick it up without even sticking to your fingers. So, I think toasting the flour, it's obviously going to remove that it's going to absorb more moisture, which means there's going to be less
free radical moisture in the cookie dough. That all adds up to less spread. more moisture, and less gluten development. Let's try that out. So,
I've toasted our flowers. Now I am taking care to sift them. To compensate for the toasted flour, I'm going to add two eggs plus one egg yolk. That should bring a little more moisture and help spread with the extra fat. Okay, let's
see if these guys spread and brown any better than their brethren before. Okay, definitely still a little puffy, but better spread and better color. Now,
I think what they need is a night in the fridge. both so they can be baked from cold and so that the flavors intensify. We're going to get better browning after going to be the key to taking these guys across the finish line. Let's see how
across the finish line. Let's see how they behave tomorrow. of sugar. I've tried increasing the eggs. I've tried not toasting the flour. Different kinds of flowers. And I still can't figure out how in the same heck to
can't figure out how in the same heck to get the thing to spread. get the thing to spread. [Music] when somebody figured out the delightfully named panbagang trick. Uh
this is a great thing to use on almost any cookie if you want a wider, flatter chocolate running through it. Basically, just take it out of the oven 2 minutes early, whack it a few times, throw it back in for the last 2 minutes to help
back in for the last 2 minutes to help solidify, and you're done. So now I'm breaking apart and shaping my ultimate cookie dough, which you know has given me some troubles. So does that make it ultimate?
to make it work, how to how to make it look good. So you know, yes. If you prescooped your dough like this and then let it age in the fridge overnight or outside is going to dry more than the rest of the cookie dough. And that
dryness is going to translate to kind of a hardened cracken layer on the outside of the cookie. So if you've pre-portioned like this, let them come up to room temperature just a little bit, 15 minutes, and then crack them
open and weld them back together. That way you're exposing more moist cookie dough to the outside so it will spread better, it'll brown better, and it'll be better. Especially with the pan bang trick. This is where putting a chocolate
feev, pressing it into the cookie dough just a little bit, the fev is going to spread out and flatten out. It will give them a bit of visual dazzle. Now, we're going to bake these at a slightly lower temperature between 330 to 350° F. And
we're going to do it for 14 minutes total. We're going to bake it for 6 minutes, rotate them, bake for another 6 minutes, take them out, pan bang them, and then two more minutes to finish them off. You know what they say, if this
tray is a whacking, don't come a jacking. Little help. Little artistic license. Yeah. Everybody else looks pretty flowy Yeah. Everybody else looks pretty flowy and random and policed out. All policked
and random and policed out. All policked up. I know he was a bad guy. But so are all artists. And I'm not. That's why I'm not an artist cuz I'm a really good guy. There we go folks. The tray is a little messy, but those look to me like some
level 10 cookies. I sprinkled some finishing salt on there. And now these guys need to cool probably at least 10 minutes on the tray until they are solid minutes on the tray until they are solid enough to move. And there you have it.
enough to move. And there you have it. Level 10 chocolate chip cookies. Let's crack one open, shall we? Oh, buddy. See what happens. [Music]
more difficult cookies I've ever had make and the rewards are commensurate with the effort. That big pool on top. You almost save it for different bites. So you get a nice big Ooh, there's some
nice dark chocolate hit there. Get any bites outside of that. You're hit with the very the subtle coffee flavor, the toffee notes of of having aged the cookie dough and the brown butter, these roasty um nutty notes in spite of how
thin they are. They're crunchy on the outside and fudgy and chewy on the cookies almost like it's almost like they're not even chocolate chip cookies. It's like they're in their own category, but technically speaking, that is what
they are. They have chocolate chips in them and they're cookies and that's it. These are true blue chocolate chip cookies, and I think they're just about as remarkable as they can get. There you have it, folks. 10 levels of chocolate
chip cookies. I honestly wasn't sure if I could pull this one off, but we got there. And I think you can you can see the progression of intricacy and quality as we go. Like, you can kind of see the
progression. Like you can see that these are, you know, store store-bought, more homemade vibes here. And you can see there's more color variation. chocolate happening. There's this guy, which is taking wild risks. There's this
guy, which is very clearly, you know, a play at gourmet. You have this guy, which is just, what the hell's that? And then you have the apex predator at the end. This is I truly believe it's going to
come down to your personal preference, but I believe for me this is a level 10 chocolate chip cookie. It is the best damn chocolate chip cookie I've ever had. And I have had
a lot of chocolate chip cookies recently. That was about as challenging as it was rewarding. I learned so much. I hope you picked up some new tips and tricks or a whole new recipe you want to try. Thank you so much for watching.
what do you want to see 10 levels of next. What kind of recipe videos do you want to see? What's your shoe size? Be honest. And keep banging out there. Pan honest. And keep banging out there. Pan banging. And you know you I I we're
Challenge Dairy for sponsoring this episode. Challenge is special because all of their dairy farmers are in California and the butter is all made in California, meaning from cow to butter takes no more than 48 hours. This means
that the butter is incredibly fresh and that Challenge is sustainable with a low carbon footprint. With these new butter cubes, Challenge is perfectly portioned and ready to be grabbed for your next kitchen project. For more info on
butter cubes, scan the QR code or head to the description. biscuits here on the Bing with Papish program. Tune in next week for new
content whether you like it or not. Till next time, I'm Bavish and you are next time, I'm Bavish and you are somebody else until we meet as one in the void. [Music]