Serious Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts

Mar 30, 2010 | Recipes

Walnut Chocolate Chip CookiesThis is a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, I guess, but it’s a really fancy recipe and takes a lot of time to do. You have to brown a bunch of butter, and toast a bunch of walnuts, and refrigerate the dough, and blah blah blah.

But it’s all worth it, though, because these cookies could shame a bakery. They could drive a world-renowned physicist to insanity. They could make an angel weep. The recipe makes a lot of cookies, and each one is really big and really dense, so they should last you awhile. And you can taste the fact that these took a long time to make. I’m serious. You can taste how fancy these are.

These cookies come from here at Sugar Plum and they were featured on Savour. (They are very classy cookies.) They are similar to Levain Bakery copycat recipes floating around, but a fair bit more dense. There is quite a contrast between the “crispiness” of the outside and the chewiness of the inside… though the cookies are much chewier than they are crispy. In terms of changes, all I did was add a bit more chocolate and reduced the bake time a bit, because soft cookies are the bomb. If you want to live up to the classiness and seriousness of these cookies, you should only use very fancy and very expensive ingredients. I did not, because I am a poor grad student, and I buy whatever is on sale at Metro.

Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

Ingredients:

  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground sea salt
  • 1.5 cups coarsely chopped walnuts
  • 1 cup unsalted butter (two sticks)
  • 4.5 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2.5 teaspoons baking soda
  • 2 teaspoons ground sea salt, plus additional for sprinkling
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened (1 stick)
  • 2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • 4 tsp vanilla extract
  • 16 oz coarsely chopped semisweet chocolate or chocolate chips

Directions:

  • Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • Melt 2 tbsp butter in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Stir in 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 tsp sea salt, and bring it all to a boil. Whisk frequently until golden brown. Stir in all of the walnuts until they are well coated. Spread the walnuts out onto a greased or buttered cookie sheet and place in the oven for 3-5 minutes, to lightly toast them. (Don’t forget about your walnuts if you move on to the next steps.)
  • Melt 1 cup butter (2 sticks) in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Keep whisking, let it boil and start to foam and brown a bit. Remove sauce pan from heat, set it aside.
  • Sift together flour, baking soda, and 2 tsp sea salt in a medium-sized bowl, and set it aside.
  • In a large mixing bowl and using an electronic mixer, beat 1/2 cup (1 stick) of softened butter with the 2 cups of brown sugar and the 1 cup of granulated sugar until it’s all well combined. (It’ll be grainy; not completely smooth.) Beat in the 1 cup of browned butter you recently heated up. Now beat in the 4 large eggs and the 4 tsp of vanilla. Add the sifted dry mixture (flour, baking soda, sea salt) to your wet mixture, and slowly beat until just combined. Stir in the chopped chocolate and the walnuts until thoroughly mixed. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
  • Drop large giant clumps of dough (at least 1/4 cup each) onto your cookie sheet. They won’t spread too much, so they don’t have to be too far apart, and you should flatten them a bit, with your palms or a fork. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 11-13 minutes, or until the edges are just starting to turn golden brown. Remove from oven, let ’em cool for a minute or two, then transfer the cookies to wire racks.