Pan Banging CCCs

Once again, my baking whims this month were dictated by my Planet Byn calendar that Danielle made for me. The whole month of June I was staring at a picture of The New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies and I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I decided it was time to tackle one of the more head-scratching recipes for Chocolate Chip Cookies on these here internets: Pan-Banging Chocolate Chip Cookies.

There are many curious instructions to follow when you make these cookies. Now of course, we all know that you’re less than 30 minutes away from Chocolate Chip Cookie bliss if you follow My Favourite recipe (and if you have softened butter), so any recipe we try that has lots of weird extra steps has to be worth it (case in point, the aforementioned NYT CCC).

PB CCC

The first puzzling instruction for this recipe comes before you even start measuring ingredients. It asks you to line your cookie sheets with foil. In almost 10 years of this blog, I have never baked cookies on anything but parchment paper, so this made me nervous right off the bat. The second weird thing about this recipe is the ratio of white sugar (1 1/2 cups) to brown sugar (only 1/4 cup!). This made me even more skeptical because brown sugar is where you get all the delicious caramel undertones in a chocolate chip cookie. There are bunch of comments I could also make here about the extra steps of freezing the dough before baking it, as well as the size of the cookies (100g each), but we’re not amateurs around here so I wasn’t worried about that. But now, the pan-banging of it all.

The whole point of these cookies is exactly what it sounds like. After baking them for ten minutes you reach into your oven, pick up the cookie sheet and bang it against the oven rack. This deflates the cookie and helps it spread out and create the wrinkles in the dough. After that initial bang, you bake for 2 minutes and bang again and repeat that about 4 more times. Perhaps it’s fun to lean into a hot oven over and over again in January, but I have to say this is ill advised in July.

Like I said before, any chocolate chip cookie with all of these extra steps better be mind-blowingly delicious and I have to say that these pan-bangers just didn’t do it for me. Without all that brown sugar, they just didn’t have the depth of flavour or chewiness I’m looking for in a chocolate chip cookie. As for the wrinkles from all that pan-banging, the Baked Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe naturally creates them for nice crispy edges with a chewy centre, without a pan-bang in sight.

More Chocolate Chip Cookies:

Pan-Banging Chocolate Chip Cookies

Source: The Vanilla Bean Blog

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
  • 2 tbsp water
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 3/4 tsp salt
  • 6oz dark chocolate, chopped

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350° and line cookie sheets with tin foil with the dull side up.
  2. In a large bowl, beat the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and brown sugar and beat until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes.
  3. Add egg, vanilla and water and mix until combined.
  4. Add the flour, baking soda and salt and mix until fully incorporated.
  5. Fold in the chocolate chunks.
  6. Use a kitchen scale to divide dough into 100g portions, and roll into balls. Put the dough balls on a plate that fits in the freezer and freeze for 15 minutes.
  7. When dough balls are fully chilled, place 3 or 4 on a cookie sheet (they will spread a LOT) and bake for 10 minutes. Open the oven, lift up the cookie sheet and bang the pan against the oven rack so the cookie deflates. Bake for 2 more minutes, bang again, and repeat that 2-3 more times until the cookies are golden brown at the edges and very wrinkly. Repeat with remaining dough balls (or leave them frozen to bake off at your leisure).