Some people get excited about the announcement of Pantone’s Color of the Year. Other people love to learn Oxford’s Word of the Year (it's rizz, as in "charisma"). And then there are people like me, Real Simple’s food director, who wait breathlessly for King Arthur Baking’s Recipe of the Year (ROTY). Start your ovens, because the big reveal just happened, and we’re going to be baking a lot of chocolate chip cookies in 2024, specifically Super-Sized, Super-Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Based in Norwich, Vermont, King Arthur Baking is best known for selling flour and baking supplies. It also hosts in-person and virtual baking workshops and publishes cookbooks. And, every year for the past 11, it has announced a recipe of the year that its team of in-house bakers has perfected over the previous 12 months (or longer). Then, as if on cue, bakers around the world make the recipe and share their results on Instagram and other platforms. Last year’s ROTY was Coffee Cake. Previous ones included Whole Grain Banana Bread, Ultimate Sandwich Bagels, and Perfectly Pillowy Cinnamon Rolls.
According to Kye Ameden, ROTY editorial lead, the bakers at King Arthur have been working on the 2024 recipe for nearly two years. “It started with tasting about a dozen of our staff’s favorite chocolatechip cookies in the early spring of 2022, followed by a workshop to identify both what makes the bestchocolate chip cookies and what kind of challenges we could solve with a new recipe.” Then senior recipe developer Molly Marzalek-Kelly got to work, baking over 75 different versions of the cookie, about 1,200 chocolate chip cookies altogether! “After some fine tuning this fall, we finally had our recipe,” shares Ameden.
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Once I found out that Super-Sized, Super-Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies were the 2024 Recipe of the Year, I hopped into my kitchen to bake them stat. I’ve made many chocolate chip cookies in my day, from the classic Toll House recipe, to vegan ones, cake-y ones, soft ones, and thin and crispy ones. I quickly discovered that this recipe is different in several ways. Here’s what stood out:
Both the Butter and Flour Get Tweaks
In a typical chocolate chip cookie recipe, room temperature butter gets creamed with sugar using an electric mixer, before adding in eggs and dry ingredients. In this recipe, cold butter is melted on the stovetop and then browned before being whisked into brown sugar. (In fact, you don't need an electric mixer at all for this recipe.) “Cookies that use creamed butter and sugar are usually more airy, puffy, and taller than cookies that use melted butter," Ameden explains. "Melted butter creates dense, fudgy cookies. Browning the butter adds an almost caramel-like flavor."
The flour is also different. Most recipes call for basic all-purpose flour, but this one uses bread flour. Bread flour has a higher percentage of protein than AP flour, which King Arthur says adds chewiness to these cookies and helps them stay soft longer.
- If you have one, use a kitchen scale to measure out the ingredients. Not only is it much more precise than using measuring cups and spoons, it keeps you from having to wash said measuring cups and spoons! I also used the scale to portion out each ball of dough (85-90 grams), to ensure even baking.
They Borrowed a Technique from Bread
Speaking of staying soft for longer, the recipe includes tangzhong, a technique widely used throughout Asia in yeasted doughs to prolong the shelf life of tender breads. It’s what helps make Japanese milk bread so soft and pillowy. Here, the process entails quickly cooking a few tablespoons of flour with a half-cup milk and mixing that into the cookie batter. It’s a quick step that Ameden says makes a big difference. “Tzanzhong created a unique texture and appearance we had never seen before. The cookie is super soft (and stays that way for a few days) and has a crackled, slightly shiny surface.”
- The recipe calls for chocolate wafers. I wasn’t able to find any, so I chopped chocolate bars. Using a large serrated (bread) knife to chop the chocolate into chunks keeps the bars from breaking into shards.
These Cookies Need Their Rest, but There’s a Shortcut
It’s not unheard of for a chocolate chip cookie recipe to call for chilling the dough overnight in the fridge for best results; this one calls for a 24 to 72 hour rest. Letting cookie dough chill out has a couple of big perks. First, because the fat in the dough is more solid after chilling (think room temperature butter versus cold butter), the cookies spread less. Second, resting concentrates the flavors in the cookies, giving them a richer sweet and toasty punch. But, if you’re desperate for immediate gratification, this recipe gives you the option to immediately bake the dough into bars. Score one for the impatient among us.
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- After chilling for at least 24 hours in the fridge, the cookie dough is pretty hard, making it challenging to form into balls. Knowing this would be the case, I followed one of the tips in the recipe: I refrigerated the dough for an hour, then shaped it into 16 balls of dough. I then refrigerated the dough balls until the next day and was able to pop them right into the oven.
The Results
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I followed the recipe to the letter, and about 24 hours after I began, I was able to bite into a huge (about four inches in diameter) chocolate chip cookie. It had golden brown crispy edges and a soft center shot through with pockets of melted chocolate. The flavor was rich with a whisper of caramel thanks to the brown sugar and brown butter in the recipe. In short, it was a complete and total winner. They may be the recipe of 2024, but I predict I’ll be making these Super-Sized, Super-Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies for many years to come.
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