It's not every day that a chocolate chip cookie makes national headlines. So when we saw that the The New York Times wrote about one blogger's recipe, we dropped everything to try it — and so did just about everyone else on the planet. Pictures of the abnormally wrinkly, behemoth chocolate chip cookie are everywhere on Instagram.
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The woman behind the craze is Sarah Kieffer, author of The Vanilla Bean Baking Book, and the secret to her raved-about cookies has nothing to do with baking time or ingredients."It's all in the pan-bang," she told The Times. Halfway through baking the cookies, when they're slightly puffed in the center, she asks you to drop the pan against the oven rack — not gently, but from about 4 inches up. The point is to have the center of each cookie to fall down. A couple minutes later, once the cookie puffs back up again, you bang it again … and again and again.
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It's not the most calming process, but it can be pretty therapeutic if you're having a long, frustrating week. Others around you, however, might get a bit annoyed. One tester I know commented that her dad "did not appreciate" all the ruckus in the kitchen. But noise complaints aside, the technique really works. It creates tree trunk-esque rings in the cookie like we've never seen before. When we baked a batch (using the same recipe) without banging the pan, the cookies spread a lot more and were significantly crunchier. The banged cookies were far superior in texture. The inside was perfectly chewy, the exterior was slightly crisp and caramelized, and all those sunken rings of cookie were ever so slightly softer.
Though pretty dang perfect in taste, this will likely not be our go-to recipe. It takes too much time! First, you need to freeze the dough for 15 minutes before baking. (If you don't, they'll spread like cray.) Then you can only bake one sheet at a time, since the cookies need to bake in the center of the oven. And on the baking sheets, you only get 4 to 6 cookies because they're so enormous.
We will, however, save this recipe for a day when we have a lot of pent-up anger and have a few hours to kill (those days exist, right?). Or when we just need a really, really good cookie.
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