Steeped
At Christmas, my Kansan-Parisian friend gifted me a box filled with tiny muslin sachets of Earl Grey French Blue tea. She had tucked this precious cargo into her luggage and brought it all the way from Paris to Lawrence, Kansas (our hometown) for the holidays. The tea, I discovered after a bit of Googling, is from Mariage Frères, a French tea company dating back to 1854.
Too special for a casual cup, the sachets were squirreled away for something — I didn't know what.
Last week, after sampling a chocolate chocolate chip cookie from the Upper West Side's Levain Bakery, I knew I wanted to attempt something similar. But I take issue with most chocolate (squared) cookies; they tend toward sickeningly sweet and are impossible to consume in their entirety.
I wanted to cut the sweetness of the chocolate-on-chocolate action without losing the richness. To accomplish this, I did something kind of weird. Hang with me.
Before mixing my dough, I browned the butter — and in it, I steeped two sachets of the tucked-away French Blue tea.
The browning of the butter is a nice trick, one which I garnered from Serious Eats. In fact, I pretty much followed the same "perfect" chocolate chip cookie recipe that I wrote about previously, reducing the salt a tad, adding cocoa powder to the dry mix, and steeping tea in the butter.
The result? A rich, still-decadent but not-too-sweet chocolate chocolate chip cookie with a bit of lightness, thanks to Mr. Earl Grey.
Earl-Grey-Infused Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies
adapted from Serious Eats' "The Food Lab"
- 2 sticks unsalted butter
- 2-4 bags Earl Grey tea
- 2 cups flour
- 3/4 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup dark cocoa powder
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
- 1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
Melt butter in a saucepan over medium high heat until it turns translucent and amber in color, about five minutes. Remove from heat. Place tea bags in a bowl and pour the hot butter over them. Allow them to steep for 30 minutes. After the tea has steeped, remove the bags and continue to cool the butter in the refrigerator until it starts to turn solid again at the edges.
Meanwhile, in an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, whip the eggs and the granulated sugar together for about five minutes, or until it turns a light brownish yellow color and falls from the whisk in thick ribbons.
In a another bowl, mix together the dry ingredients with a fork.
Once the butter has cooled, add it and the dark brown sugar to the egg mixture and beat on medium for 15-30 seconds. Turn mixer to low and gradually add the dry ingredients until just incorporated. Add the chocolate chips and mix until well-distributed.
Transfer the dough to a Tupperware container and refrigerate overnight. You don't absolutely have to wait a day to bake these, but the flavors will be more intense if you do.
When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325 degrees with the racks in the upper middle part of the oven. Bring the dough to room temperature and scoop into balls, each about 3 tablespoons worth of dough. Bake six cookies at a time on a parchment-lined cookie sheet for 16 minutes (your oven may vary, so keep an eye on the first batch).