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My favorite cookie is the most nostalgic: chocolate chip cookies. While I think they're worthy of celebration and I would never turn one down, when King Arthur revealed their 2024 Recipe of the Year to be Supersized Super-Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies, it gave me pause. There are so many incredible chocolate chip cookie recipes out there. Could these really be deserving of the crown?
I baked them and it turns out, King Arthur's winning recipe may be the only chocolate chip cookie recipe you'll need from now on. It may be hard for you to believe me because of the excessive hyperbole in online food writing all vying for attention. Against my editor’s wishes, I wouldn't mind if you don't finish reading this article, but please do yourself a favor and make these cookies now! (The recipe is linked below.)
King Arthur’s Innovative Techniques for the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
On my first skim through the recipe, I saw all the typical tips for chewy cookies. They are techniques I’ve seen in countless articles and have myself suggested as a pastry professional—use bread flour instead of all-purpose flour, melt the butter, or even better, brown the butter, use all brown sugar and no granulated sugar, use chopped chocolate instead of chocolate chips, and chill the cookies overnight. And yet I realized... I have never made a cookie that relies on every single one of these tips. In a genius turn of events, King Arthur does. They pulled out all the stops.
Before you get overwhelmed, let me just say that they were thoughtful in how to apply these techniques with beginner bakers in mind. It's technically a one bowl and one saucepan recipe—no special equipment necessary—a detail that acknowledges the humble core of what a chocolate chip cookie is.
Tangzhong Is the Ultimate Trick for Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
What I didn’t expect to see, and the reason I went straight to the kitchen to test the recipe was the use of tangzhong. It's a centuries-old Chinese technique used in bread baking. It’s famously used in Japanese milk bread, giving it a luscious texture that pulls apart in strands.
To make tangzhong, a small portion of the recipe’s flour is cooked with milk on the stove, forming a paste. The starches gelatinize and swell from absorbing the milk, allowing you to add extra moisture and softness without the dough becoming too wet. I’ve used it in sandwich breads, cinnamon rolls, and dinner rolls, but I’ve never seen it used outside of yeasted doughs.
Tangzhong makes these cookies incredibly soft, with a chewy texture, and crisp edges. Yes, those are the characteristics of any good chocolate chip cookie, but this smart technique contributes more to those goals than any other trick I’ve tried—I’ve made a lot of cookies in a lot of kitchens.
For example, I add cornstarch for extra starch and a soft texture, a technique I learned 10 years ago on Sally’s Baking Addiction. That gives you a cookie that’s soft edge-to-edge like a Pepperidge Farm Soft Baked Cookie with no crisp-chewy goodness.
Inspired by Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar recipes, I also use milk powder to make chewy cookies. It adds a concentrated hit of milk’s proteins, sugars, and fats without any water affecting the ratio of liquids in a recipe. But what if you could add the moisture without ruining the cookie?
Of all the tricks, tangzhong takes the win by giving cookies extra starch for softness, a chew that's like al dente pasta, milky caramel flavor, moisture you wouldn’t get from milk powder, and no compromise on the crisp edges. To top it all off, according to King Arthur, the tangzhong keeps these cookies soft for days. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I was able to test that because they were gone in a day.
As an avid and professional baker, it’s exciting to find a recipe for something as ubiquitous as chocolate chip cookies that’s truly innovative and lets me geek out about baking science. If you’re still not convinced, let me tell you that in between drafts of this story, I made another batch because I was tired of writing about them without getting to eat one more.
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