Great American Chocolate Chip Cookies

These are classic American chocolate chip cookies in the Toll House tradition: butter creamed with equal parts granulated and brown sugar, two eggs, two and a half cups of flour, a full bag of semisweet chocolate chips, and walnuts (or any nut) folded in if you like. The brown sugar handles chewiness; the granulated sugar handles the crisp edges. A 50/50 ratio gives you both at once.

This recipe is also a clever two-format situation. Drop them by teaspoonfuls for traditional 6 dozen cookies, or spread the same dough into a jelly-roll pan and bake 20 minutes for soft, chewy bars. The bar version takes minutes to assemble and avoids the back-and-forth of multiple sheet pans.

A moderate oven temperature is what gives you the classic gold-brown edge with a soft middle. Pull them when the edges are set but the centers still look slightly underdone; carryover heat finishes them on the hot sheet.

Pro Tips

• Use room-temperature butter, not melted. Truly softened butter creams properly with the sugar to trap air; melted butter gives flatter, greasier cookies.
• Beat the butter and sugars together until truly pale and fluffy, at least 3 to 4 minutes. This step builds the structure that makes a tender cookie.
• Don’t overbake. The 8 to 10 minute window is tight; cookies that look fully done in the oven will be hard once cool.
• Let cookies sit on the hot sheet for a minute before moving to a rack. They’re too soft to lift cleanly straight out of the oven.

Variations

• Use bittersweet 60% chocolate chips or chopped chocolate for a less-sweet, more grown-up cookie.
• Brown the butter before creaming for a deeper, nuttier base flavor (cool it back to room temp first).
• Add 1 teaspoon of espresso powder to deepen the chocolate without coffee flavor.