Ina Garten's Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies

I do bakery recipe development. I baked Ina Garten's Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies and I'm gonna show you what I did with the recipe as a developer. This isn't saying the recipe is bad or needs to be fixed. First thing I do is I don't bake or develop in volume. So I knew going into this I might need a couple of tests before I got the ideal version of this cookie I'm after. So the first decision was about flour. The recipe calls for 2 cups of AP flour and I had to decide what I was going to weigh. So I started with 250. Or 125 grams per cookie. So I knew that could potentially give me a thinner cookie, but I did want to start there. I'd rather see what 250 grams of flour does and add flour later on the next batch. Then start too high and then change what this cookie is supposed to be. So I also standardized a few other things. I used 58 grams of whole egg, 3 grams of fine salt instead of kosher salt. King Arthur unbleached AP flour and Valiant Farms unsalted butter in a really good chocolate. I did run out of dark chocolate, so the test ended up with 100 grams of chocolate. And that's gonna change in test two. It's gonna change in test two. So I started tracking temperature. My butter was 67 degrees Fahrenheit, egg was 64. And after the 15 minute freeze, my first dough portions were about 52 degrees Fahrenheit. So this is why I like tracking dough temperature. It's not telling you the actual condition of the dough when it goes into the oven. And my cookies were about 92 to 93 grams each. I kept the dough balls tall, didn't press them down. They were round 1.75 to 2 inches. I also baked some on the dark pan, some on the light pan. The dark pan is going to give you more crinkles, almost too dramatic for what I wanted, but it's going to color faster, spread a little less. And then I moved the same dough to a light colored pan and that's the one I preferred. Got a larger diameter, lighter color, still plenty of crinkles, but the cookie felt more even. I wasn't pushing the edges and bottom quite as far toward crisp, which is more of what I wanted from this cookie. Something else I noticed during the bake is that they can look pretty greasy before they set, but looking at the formula, there's a lot of butter, plus the 227 grams of chocolate. So seeing some fat during the bake doesn't mean your finished cookies are going to eat greasy. But mine didn't. Once it cooled, it was really buttery and really good. So my biggest flavor note was salt though. The 3 grams of salt with my 250 grams of flour puts me at 1.2% and that's just too low for me. I do prefer at least 1.5% in a cookie like this. So I didn't change a bunch of ingredients before I made the recipe or anything. I made it first, tracked it, compared the pans and now I know what I want to test. So I can test two similar to another cinnamon roll I'm going to be posting soon where I'll show you how I take a home baking online recipe that we have access to and how I would change it for a client or standardize it for bakery reproduction. And then let you know if I add any special ingredients.