America's Test Kitchen Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 2 ⅛ cup all purpose flour,10 2/3 ounces*
• ½ teaspoon table salt
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and still slightly warm
• 1 cup brown sugar (light or dark), 7 ounces
• ½ cup granulated sugar, 3 1/2 ounces
• 1 large egg
• 1 large egg yolk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cups chocolate chips (I use dark chocolate chips)
  

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Adjust oven racks to upper and lower middle positions.

Whisk flour, salt, and baking soda together in a medium bowl.

In a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, mix butter and sugars until lighter in color and thoroughly blended. Add in egg, yolk, and vanilla. Add dry ingredients; mix until just combined. Stir in chips. I often mix the chips in at the same time as the dry ingredients.

I change the recipe here from ATK. They say to take a scant 1/4 cup of dough to make a ball, then split it in half, rotate pieces 90 degrees, and make into a single cookie again. I'm impatient and like the cookies slightly smaller, plus I am super lazy about cookies, so I just drop dough on my scale until the dough measures 45 grams. (Weighing cookie dough is so much faster and there's little mess to clean up.) I squeeze them just a bit to make them taller.

Line 2 half sheet cookie sheets with parchment. I usually get about 24 cookies depending on how much dough my husband eats, and 12 fit per pan.

Bake until cookies for about 7 minutes then switch their positions. Bake about 5 to 8 minutes more until they are light golden brown and outer edges start to harden yet centers are still puffy.

*I prefer grams to ounces, but ATK only uses ounces. In addition, they use 5 ounces of AP flour per cup, but many others use 4¼ (King Aurthur) or 4½. When I do other recipes I use KA's 4¼ ounces/120g because that's my favorite flour.)