The Official Laika Loveless Chocolate Chip Cookie
Yields 18-24 medium-sized cookies
2¼ cups All-Purpose Flour (270g)
1 cup Unsalted Butter (226g)
1¼ cups Turbinado Sugar (225g) (or 1⅛ cup Granulated White Sugar (225g))
¼ cup Molasses (not blackstrap) (85g)
1 tsp Vanilla Extract (5g)
3 cups Chocolate Chips (510g)
Preheat
If baking cookies immediately, preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C). If making the dough for a later date, hold off on this until you’re ready to bake them.
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Brown the butter.
Set an empty heat-proof bowl or walled sheet tray ready on the counter. Melt the butter in a saucepan over high heat, stirring constantly. Once fully melted, continue to cook the butter on high, stirring constantly, being sure to scrape the bottom of the pan as you do. For a few minutes the melted butter will sputter and let off a great deal of steam, but will otherwise change little. This is because the butter has a lot of water in it, which is boiling off, and keeping the mixture at roughly 212°F (100°C). Once all the water boils off the mixture will rapidly rise in temperature, so watch it carefully. A foam will form on the surface, then it will gradually disappear. As it does, you’ll begin to notice small flakes in the liquid, those are the milk fats. Watch the milk fats carefully, still stirring, and when they begin to turn dark tan/brown remove the pan from the heat and immediately pour the contents into your empty bowl or tray. If there are brown dregs in the pan, make sure to scrape them out into the rest of the browned butter. If the dregs are black, however, they should be thrown out, as they are burnt. Allow the browned butter to cool to room temperature, or until it’s solid enough to shape in your hands like clay. The thinner the mixture is spread, the faster this will happen, so a sheet tray will cool the butter faster than a bowl.
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Mix the dry ingredients.
In a mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Set this aside.
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Mix the wet ingredients.
In a mixing bowl, or the bowl of a stand mixer, add the browned butter, as well as the sugar, molasses, and vanilla extract. Cream these together either with a whisk, an electric mixer, or a stand mixer, until they are smooth and uniform. Continue mixing, and add the eggs one at a time, ensuring one is fully mixed in before the next is added. Stop mixing once fully incorporated.
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Make the dough.
Add one third of the dry mixture to the wet mixture and fold it in, taking care not to overwork the dough. Once it is mostly homogenous (it’s okay for a dust or a few lumps of the flour to show) add the next third of the dry ingredients. Repeat this process until all the dry mix is used. Once the mixture is mostly homogenous, add the chocolate chips, and fold to incorporate. You want a roughly even distribution of chocolate chips, but the more you fold and stir the dough the more gluten will develop, which will make the final cookie tougher and less enjoyable.
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Storage
If you are making the dough ahead, now is the time to either shape it into a log and wrap it in plastic wrap, press it into a Tupperware, or fill a plastic bag with it and press the air out. As the dough sits in the fridge, the flavors will continue to develop and intermingle, producing a tastier cookie. For ease of later use, rolling the dough into a roughly 2-inch (7-8 cm) diameter log is ideal, as half-inch (1.5 cm) slices of this log can be directly laid out on a parchment lined sheet-tray without the need to roll dough balls. As for time spent in the fridge, three days is optimal, so if you want the best result, make the dough three days before baking the cookies. The dough will last in the fridge up to a week, and can be frozen for longer storage (you can always double the batch and stick half of it in the freezer for the next time you get a craving!). When you’re ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C)
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Baking
Line a sheet pan with baking parchment. Roll balls of dough slightly larger than a golf ball (roughly 1.5 inches (4 cm) in diameter) and place them on the parchment lined sheet pan with a good deal of space between. Six dough balls should fit comfortably in two rows of three on a standard half-size sheet tray (the size most commonly used in home baking). Bake the cookies for 9-11 minutes depending on desired texture (more time will make for a crispier cookie).
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Cooling
After removing the sheet tray from the oven, hold the tray roughly 8-10 inches above your stove top or a heat-proof cutting board and drop it. Do this once more. If you do not have sufficient counter space or confidence to attempt this, you can instead twice tap one side of the tray hard against a heat proof surface like the front lip of your stove, then rotate it and do the same to the other side, or hit the underside of the tray with an oven-mitt clad hand. This action serves to slightly deflate the cookies, producing a chewier, fudgier, denser texture instead of a caky or crumbly one. At this point, if desired, a pinch of flakey salt may now be sprinkled atop each cookie for extra presentation and flavor points. Allow the cookies to rest on the sheet pan for 2-3 minutes, then use a spatula to transfer them to a wire rack to cool. Ideal eating temperature is when they are firm enough to hold without giving out, but still warm enough for the chocolate to be a little messy. Once the cookies have cooled completely, they can be warmed up again before enjoying with about 2 minutes in a toaster oven or air fryer.
Want to change it up? Try swapping out half the chocolate chips for butterscotch chips, toffee bits, walnuts, pecans, raisins, or any other desired mix-in.
