Ina Garten’s Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies
A modern, perfectly textured cookie with the ideal ratio of salty to sweet.
When it comes to most any recipe, be it chocolate chip cookies or even potato salad, you can always trust Ina Garten. Her recipes are approachable and homey but always, always delicious. And her Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies are no exception. In fact, they just might be my perfect chocolate chip cookie! Modernized with a touch of salt and chocolate chunks, they’re as gorgeous as they are tasty.
We made these cookies as a part of our Celebrity Chocolate Chip Cookie Showdown. It’s a fun thing where we take four celebrity recipes — some celebrity chefs, some not so much — cook them, and then taste and compare them to see how they stack up. This match-up included Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, Joanna Gaines, and Ree Drummond. Maybe not so hard to believe, but Ina was definitely one of the cookies that came out on top.
Ina’s dough is interesting. She calls for a half a pound of butter (that’s two sticks!), only a touch of brown sugar, an extra large egg, chopped bittersweet chocolate, and also some fleur de sel to finish things off. (All the other normal cookie accoutrements too like flour and baking soda; I’m just pointing out the unique choices.) She uses a creaming method that’s pretty standard.
And then she asks you to scoop out that dough in very large scoops — 1/3 cup in size — before placing them on a parchment lined baking sheet. At first, she has you line up as many scoops as you want on the baking sheet and then you’re instructed to freeze the scooped dough for exactly fifteen minutes. No more, no less, and that fact is mentioned a couple of times.
You then take only four scoops of the semi-frozen dough and pop them on a baking sheet far apart from each other to bake. These are big cookies, after all!
Then comes for a unique technique:
You bake the cookies for ten minutes, then you take the pan from the oven and bang it on the stovetop or counter until the cookies deflate a bit. You return them to the oven for three minutes, then remove and bang them again, then return them to the oven, and repeat until they’ve baked for a total of eighteen minutes.
Then, finally, that delicious finish of fleur de sel.
The verdict? This is an incredible cookie. Crisp on the edges with the perfect ratio of chocolate to cookie and an ideal balance of sweet to salty. The banging is a little tedious but it’s what gives this cookie it’s signature crinkled shape (and texture!). That being said, we’d like to experiment with maybe using only one set of the banging technique and see how that does. These are a must-make!
See our Celebrity Chocolate Chip Cookie Showdown to see how the others matched up.
Ina Garten's Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies
Diet: Vegetarian
Ingredients
- 1/2 lb (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 1/4 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
- 1 extra large egg, at room temperature
- 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 8 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped (such as Lindt)
- Fleur de sel or sea salt, for sprinkling
Preparation
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and arrange three racks evenly spaced in the oven. (See note below.)
- In a mixing bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, beat the butter on medium speed until creamy, 3 minutes. Add granulated and brown sugar, and continue beating until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes.
- Scrape down sides of bowl with a rubber spatula, then add the egg, vanilla, and 2 tablespoons of warm water and mix until just combined on low speed.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. While mixing on low, slowly add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, followed by the chocolate (including any fine chocolate dust) until just combined. Use a rubber spatula to mix well.
- Scoop dough out onto a sheet pan, using a 2 1/4 inch ice cream scoop or 1/3 cup measuring cup. (This was yield 12 scoops.)
- Freeze dough for exactly 15 minutes, then place 4 balls of dough on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Repeat with remaining dough.
- Bake 10 minutes, until cookies are slightly puffed in the center. Remove from oven and bang pan on the stovetop until center of cookies deflate. Return to oven for 3 minutes, then bang on stovetop again. Continue baking and banging every 3 minutes, until cookies have been in the oven for 18-20 minutes total and are golden brown around the edges. Rotate pans so cookies bake evenly.
- Sprinkle cookies with fleur de sel and let cool completely on the pans.
- Note: If your oven only has two racks, you can bake these cookies in two batches, but don't freeze any batch of dough longer than 15 minutes.
Recipe from The Barefoot Contessa.