With the above criteria in mind, this recipe is the closest I’ve come to experiencing CCC perfection. It’s the “not so secret” secret recipe from Jacque Torres, and I’m sure many of you have read about this or already tried this at home. I’ve been making this recipe countless times, and have found that the following tips make this cookie absolutely perfect:

- Don’t substitute the pastry and bread flours w. AP flour. I really believe that the combination of the pastry and bread flours give the cookie a nice slightly crunchy exterior giving way to a really tender middle.

- Hand chopped chocolate chunks, NOT premade chips – I will purchase a hunk of the best bittersweet chocolate that I can afford and hand cut them into chunks. The easiest method to chop a block of chocolate: nuke the block at 50% power for a few seconds, no more. It softens the chocolate just enough. Then take a large kitchen knife and chop away! Your effort will be rewarded with really nice ribbons of melted chocolate throughout the cookie.

- Chill the cookie dough at least 24 hours (I let my dough sit anywhere from 2-3 days) before baking. This is not for taste reasons that were recently written about in an article from NY Times (god forbid we’re aging cookie dough…let’s leave that for wine and cheese). IMHO, refrigeration makes a difference with the look and texture. I think the dough sets in a way so when you bake the cookies, you end up with the lovely wrinkles and folds as the balls of dough spread and bake. Until I encounter another recipe that will move mountains, I think have finally found my perfect chocolate chip cookie!

Makes twenty-six 5-inch cookies or 8 1/2 dozen 1 1/4-inch cookies