Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am not shy about my love of chocolate chip cookies. I love ‘em. I can’t get enough of that carby-chewy-chocolaty combo. I will try almost any kind of cookie—sugar, oatmeal, etc.—but my love affair begins and ends with chocolate chip cookies.

I have long been on the search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. It’s an untenable goal, I know, but the journey is fun. Friends have pointed me to recipes and bakeries asserting that they have found the one for me, but all have fallen short. I’ve found some stellar recipes, and frequented some amazing bakeries, but nothing yet has made me stop my search.

There have been many loves along the way, each one a learning experience, building upon the last. I’ll walk you though some of the highlights and share the recipes. All the variations will be good and you may find yourself satisfied with a number of them, but I’ll keep searching.

Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies

To understand the origin of my obsession, it’s best to start at the beginning, and in the beginning, there was Nestle Toll House.

This is the now classic recipe seen on the back of every bag of Nestle Toll House morsels. The original recipe is attributed to Ruth Wakefield, one of the owners of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts in the 1930s. There are two popular variants of how the first chocolate chip cookie came to be. The commonality of both stories is that the end result was an accident. One version states that Mrs. Wakefield added chocolate expecting it to melt into the dough. The second version claims that a chocolate bar was shaken off a shelf by the vibrations of a kitchen mixer. That chocolate bar fell into the mixing bowl where it was broken up and incorporated. Either way it happened, we can be glad of the addition.

So let’s make them already.

Original Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies
The recipe comes from the Nestle website.
Ingredients
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 packed brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 cups chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 375F with the oven rack in the middle position.
2. In a bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and salt.
3. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter, sugars and vanilla extract. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat thoroughly to combine after each addition.
4. Gradually add the flour mixture to the large mixing bowl. Fold in the chocolate chips.
5. Scoop rounded tablespoons of the dough onto a cookie sheet and bake for 9 to 11 minutes (until golden brown on the edges). I use parchment paper to make for easier cleanup. Allow to cook slightly and transfer to a cooking rack.

Rounded tablespoons of dough.

Into the oven for 9-11 minutes.

Finished cookies.

Note: I sifted the flour before measuring and the cookies came out a bit thinner than I remembered. After talking with some friends, I figured out that not sifting your flour actually makes for the thicker cookies to which most people are accustomed. So, err on the side of using too much flour than too little. Cooking For Engineers tests confirmed my suspicions.