Chef Jacques Torres' Pro-Tip For The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

It might seem like we've always had chocolate chip cookies in our lives, but their iconic recipe is actually less than 100 years old. And while most of us are content to follow the classic instructions on the back of the bag of chips, there's always room for improvement, especially when you're award-winning pastry chef Jacques Torres. The French-born host of "Chocolate with Jacques Torres" takes his chocolate chip cookie recipe to the next level by using a blend of two different flours to get the perfect texture.

If you're not a baker, you probably haven't considered using different kinds of flour. Most recipes simply call for "flour," meaning all-purpose flour. But there are actually several different types of flour, each with different levels of gluten protein. To make the perfect cookie with a light, delicate texture but with just enough chewy structure, Torres uses cake flour blended with bread flour instead of all-purpose flour.

The biggest difference between the three most common types of white flour — which include all-purpose, bread, and cake flour — is in the protein. Every flour company mills wheat into flour with different percentages of protein based on their proprietary specifications. The more protein there is in the flour, the more structure it brings to your bread and pastries. Depending on the company, all-purpose flour contains around 9 to 11% protein, while bread flour can have up to 13% protein, and cake flour has as little as 6%. Since bakers like to keep things simple, each type of flour is named for its corresponding use, so you don't have to memorize protein percentages to know what to buy. Less protein in the flour will create less gluten, which gives your food a fluffy, cake-like texture. Bread flour has lots of protein, thus lots of gluten, which gives your foods a harder, chewy texture, which is why it's used for foods like sourdough bread or bagels. 

Most chocolate chip cookie recipes use all-purpose flour, which is often referred to as "AP" flour. This is because AP has enough gluten protein to make a good cookie without coming out either too chewy or too soft. Torres, however, is a master pastry chef and has spent a lifetime tinkering around with different types of flour, so he decided to play around with the protein levels in his cookie recipe. 

Torres came up with a cookie made with a roughly 50-50 blend of cake and bread flour, which gives the cookies an ideal texture and height. The bread flour lets the cookie spread out and get fluffy, while the cake flour allows it to rise. Using the two different types of flour will not have any impact on the taste of a chocolate chip cookie, it should be noted. In this Instagram post, he said that he loves this combination.

Flour choice is not the only bit of advice Torres has shared with audiences over the years. For starters, make sure to always use butter that is 82 to 84% fat. In the U.S., butter only needs to have 80% butterfat, so look for European butter like Kerrygold, which has 82% butterfat, or Aldi's Countryside Creamery Pure Irish Butter, which is a solid Kerrygold dupe.

Torres also recommends mixing the cookie dough and refrigerating it overnight before baking the cookies. This allows the dough to set and absorb some of the liquid from the eggs, which gives the cookies a cohesive texture and a richer flavor.

Chocolate chip cookies are made with sturdy recipes that are easy to execute, which is probably why they're so popular. With just a simple flour swap and perhaps some fancy butter, you can make even the generic recipe on the bag of chocolate chips really shine.