Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 ½ cup brown sugar
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
12 oz. flour
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 heaping teaspoon fleur de sel
Large handful of toasted pecans, crushed
Approx 9 oz chopped dark chocolate (Trader Joe’s Pound Plus Dark Chocolate [54% cacao?])
Approx 5 oz (or 1 cup) Ghirardelli 60% cacao chocolate chips
Cream butter and sugars. Beat in vanilla and eggs. Stir flour, baking powder, baking soda, and fleur de sel together in a separate bowl. Add flour mixture to the butter/sugar and stir until mostly combined. Add pecans, chocolate chunks, and chocolate chips and mix with electric mixer until the pecans and chocolate are evenly dispersed throughout the cookie dough.
Refrigerate dough for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 360F.
Use a #40 scoop to portion dough. Place six to eight cookies on a pan lined with parchment paper and bake for approximately 13 minutes or until done.
Recipe yields slightly more than 30 cookies.
Notes
Original recipe that I adapted over the years: Savory Sweet Life’s / Alice Currah’s “The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe EVER!”
I used to not refrigerate the dough before baking it when I was baking the cookies on nonstick pans. However when we switched to using aluminum pans (Nordic Ware Natural Aluminum; we needed pans that we could use at a high temperature that would not warp and make a banging sound on the oven rack) I noticed that the cookies would spread out much thinner than when I used the nonstick pans. I now need to refrigerate the dough for at least half an hour before baking the cookies.
I like to use a mix of pecans, chocolate chunks, and chocolate chips to add more texture to the cookies. This particular dough requires on a lot of “add-ins” to increase the volume of the dough. If you do not add enough chocolate and pecans to the dough you will end up with less cookies.
The dough can also be baked in a half sheet jelly roll pan for about 30 minutes and cut into bars; however the pan is slightly too large for the dough and I mitigate this by loosely crumpling up foil on ¼ of the short edge of the pan. Lay a sheet of parchment paper over the foil and the pan before adding the cookie dough.
Variations:
Lavender Dark Chocolate: Grind one tablespoon lavender buds with the granulated sugar, or try to pinch the lavender buds and sugar between your fingers to “grind” the lavender buds. Omit the pecans and instead use more chopped dark chocolate and dark chocolate chips. Add a pinch of kosher salt to the flour mixture rather than the fleur de sel. Sprinkle the fleur de sel on top of each piece of cookie dough before baking.
Brown Butter: I once made this recipe with brown butter, but the flavor of the brown butter was lost after the cookies were baked. The brown butter also resulted in a drier dough. I had added walnuts, Guittard Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips (54% cacao), and Guittard Extra Dark Chocolate Chips (63% cacao). The cookies tasted better the day after they had been baked, but I still could not detect the taste of brown butter.
Milk Chocolate Almond:
10 oz flour (rather than 12oz)
1 cup whole, toasted almonds
1/2 cup rolled oats
approx 8oz milk chocolate, roughly chopped
Pulse almonds in food processor until roughly chopped. Add oatmeal and pulse further until almond pieces are smaller (some of the almonds will end up too finely ground, but that's okay).
Fold chocolate and almonds / oats into dough. Mix further with electric mixer.
