Flour Power: The Secret to the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie

Oh, happy day! What perfect timing, too, here on Thanksgiving Eve, to be graced with such baking goodness – a miracle, you might even say! – in my little Paris kitchen.

You see, I have been bemoaning the too-fluffy French flour since I’ve been here, and I have spent countless hours ruining batch after batch of the most American of cookies, the humble chocolate chip. I tried the Francine flour, which is as light as talcum powder. I tried the #65 flour (some arcane French form of flour grading, which I’m still fuzzy on) from Naturalia, the bio grocer, which is supposed to have more heft than the regular French flour. I tried mixing the two of them, which one friend suggested. I have baked with the heat on the bottom, as we do at home, and with the convection oven, too. Cookies flat as crepes, or little puffy discs with absolutely no taste whatsoever. They all ended up in la pubelle.

So, awhile back, I simply gave up on the chocolate chip cookie.

I was ranting about French flour just the other day, when one of the students in my class said, as if this were the most obvious answer to my dilemma, “Why don’t you just try the British flour?”

So today I dashed off to The English Shop right down the street, and picked up a bag of flour to see if finally I could get this cookie to cook up the way that it’s supposed to in my teensy oven.

I mixed up the batter just as I always did, using the recipe from the back of the Nestle chocolate chip bag.

Added the Callebaut chocolate bits instead of chocolate chips…

Baked them up at 375, and, look…a perfect chocolate chip cookie!

See the texture? None of that flat business or the fluffy stuff like past disasters; rather, soft on the inside, and crispy on the outside, just as it should be. Cookie heaven, I tell you!

To make sure I was right about this divine baking intervention, I quickly ate three of them, then left the kitchen, making sure to shut the door behind me, so the magic wouldn’t escape. The rest of the dough’s in the fridge for tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving, all. Even though chocolate chip cookies aren’t part of the traditional feast, for me, at least, these cookies taste like home, and I’m very thankful for that.