It’s a good thing that opposites attract.
We often joke that my husband is the Nasdaq to my “flatline.” His personality tends to be more volatile than mine, which is fairly even-keeled.
And when it comes to cookies, he favors a soft, cakey texture to my fondness for crisp and chewy.
So, when Harvard-educated pastry chef Joanne Chang of Boston’s Flour Bakery & Cafe came out with a recipe last year for chocolate chip cookies that promised to be chewy with the addition of bread flour in the dough, I was intrigued whether it would somehow satisfy both my husband’s likes, as well as my own.
The recipe, “Chocolate Chunk Cookies” is from Chang’s cookbook, “Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery & Cafe” (Chronicle Books), of which I received a review copy. The cookbook includes more than 100 recipes from her bakery, where 1,500 customers come to get their sweet tooth fix every day.
The dough calls for both milk chocolate and semisweet chocolate. I used a sample of Taza Semi-Sweet Baking Squares that I had recently received. Unlike other chocolates, Taza’s products are processed minimally and made from stone-ground beans. The result is chocolate with a much rougher texture, but deep flavor. The baking squares are earthy, with a noticeable acidity and slight bitterness. An 8-ounce container is $10.50.
The dough is a mix of all-purpose and bread flour, along with both granulated and light brown sugars, and plenty of butter. Chang recommends letting the dough firm up in the refrigerator for at least a day before baking the cookies to let the ingredients meld, which is what I did.
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