Sea Salt Brings The Contrast The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Need
There are countless chocolate chip cookie recipes out there, and finding the one that best suits your tastes can require some trial and error. If you're team crunchy cookie, for example, you'll want to add more white sugar, while softer, chewier cookies can benefit from cake flour. If you're looking for the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, however, you might want to add some flaky sea salt for a savory twist.
Mashed recipe developer Mark Beahm shared his favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, and it brings together the best of both worlds: a cookie that's soft and chewy but has crispy edges. He specified that he adds the sea salt after the cookies have baked to achieve "that sweet and salty combination." For the most part, his cookie recipe includes the standard cast of characters, namely sugar, flour, baking soda, baking powder, butter, eggs, and vanilla extract. Beahm's addition of sea salt, however, gives the cookies a unique spin, as does his use of both brown and white sugar and his inclusion of melted butter. Beahm shared that melted butter makes the cookie even chewier than those made with softened butter, and as for the brown sugar, he uses the light variety but dark can be substituted if you prefer a stronger molasses flavor and darker color.
Salt adds depth to chocolate chip cookies
Everyone knows salt is of utmost importance when cooking, but it's also crucial when baking, as it helps other flavors stand out and taste even better. Your food won't necessarily taste salty — the right amount of salt simply helps the food taste more like itself. In baked goods, salt works to balance the sweetness, ensuring the final product isn't overly saccharine. Make sure you're using the correct type of salt, though, as table salt and sea salt aren't interchangeable in baking. In this recipe, sea salt is used both in the batter and on top of the finished cookies.
Beahm shared his reasoning for using flaky salt: "Chocolate chip cookies have a sweet toffee-caramel flavor, and when you add the salt on top, it's a lot like that magic salted-caramel taste." He also uses crunchy, flaky salt to give the cookies some texture and extra flavor. In terms of chocolate, Beahm prefers chopped chocolate rather than chips. Chopped chocolate isn't uniform in size, meaning you get a mix of both large chunks and tiny shards. He did specify that he prefers semi-sweet chocolate, saying, "That has the best balance between the sugar in the dough, the slightly bitter chocolate, and the sea salt."