New twist on an old favorite

Is it possible to reinvent the Tollhouse cookie recipe? According to Alton Brown (of Food Network fame), yes, and he tweaked it three different ways to produce "The Thin", "The Puffy" and "The Chewy". I had been intrigued by the concept ever since reading about the recipes on Beantown Baker's blog. I decided to go with "The Chewy" since that's my favorite texture for a cookie or a brownie.

Ingredients
2 sticks of butter
2 1/4 cups of bread flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
t teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1 teaspoon almond extract (my addition, I love almond extract in my chocolate chip cookies, a tip I learned from my friend Z)
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips


Instructions

Heat oven to 375 degrees.

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over low heat. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.

Pour the melted butter in a large mixing bowl. Add the sugar and brown sugar. Cream the butter and the sugars on medium speed. Add the egg, yolk, 2 tablespoons of milk, vanilla extract and almond extract - mix until well combined. It will look like this in consistency:


Slowly incorporate flour mixture until thoroughly combined:



Stir in chocolate chips. Chill the dough (I chilled it for an hour in the fridge) and scoop onto parchment lined sheets (I used my Silpats). This is where my cookies veered away from Alton's - I used my medium sized cookie scoop but they were clearly a lot smaller than Alton's since he describes six to a sheet, and I was able to fit your typical twelve:


Resulting cookies were good, and had a nice, shiny sheen to them - not sure if that comes out in the pictures. But in my opinion, they weren't anything special - not that they were bad in anyway but I think regular Tollhouse recipe works just as well. I was expecting to kosher salt to come out more, you could really taste in the raw dough but it faded in the final product.

I may have to try "The Puffy" next to check out how those turn out. And buy a bigger cookie scoop!