FOOD NEWS
Alton Brown's Flour Swap For Chocolate Chip Cookies Is
A Must-Try
By Margaret McCormick
Thin and crispy, thick and chewy, crispy edges but soft in the middle: Everyone seems to have an opinion and sometimes a hack for making the best possible chocolate chip cookies. Alton Brown, the culinary scientist of food TV, believes the right flour is essential to chocolate chip cookies, and it's probably not the flour you've grown accustomed to using.
Brown uses the iconic recipe on the bag of Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate morsels — which was created by Toll House Inn owner Ruth Wakefield in the 1930s — as a starting point for his Chewy Chocolate Chip cookies, but tweaks it in a couple of different ways. The biggest change Brown makes is to substitute bread flour for all-purpose flour.
Cookies are often made with all-purpose flour, but bread flour, which has more protein and gluten than all-purpose flour, provides the finished product more structure and stability and, as a result, more chewy goodness. Part chef, part food educator, and part innovator, Brown might as well be dubbed the king of culinary hacks.