Binging with Babish: Bobby’s Cookies from King of the Hill

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This week, we’re taking a look at Bobby Hill’s brilliant (and age-appropriate) idea of doubling the butter in a factory-standard chocolate chips cookie. How can we prevent paper-thin, floppy, ineffectual cookies as a result of all the added richness? We need only listen to the wisdom of Lama Sanglug: let the wind take the world away, and make sure the butter stays emulsified.

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– [Babish] This episode is brought to you by Cash App. Cash App is the easiest way to send, spend, and save your money. Besides just sending money back and forth, with Cash App, you can invest in stocks with as little as $1, as well as buy, sell, and send Bitcoin instantly. It’s as easy as tiny whisking to combine. Download Cash App today and use code BABISH22 to get $15 for free, and $10 will be donated to No Kid Hungry. – We could really use a good pitcher, I’ll tell you what. (munching) Mmm. ‘Cause if you can pitch as good as you make cookies… – My answer is still no. And Bobby baked them. – What? – I used double the butter. Aren’t they great? Better than the Arrow Girls’. – Oh, God. You didn’t join the Arrow Girls, did ya? – No, and I never will. – [Babish] Hey, what’s up, guys? Welcome back to "Binging with Babish," where this week, we’re taking a look at Bobby’s double-butter cookies from "King of the Hill," which, when I spotted during my seventh or eighth rewatch of season 3, got me thinking: What would actually happen if you just doubled the butter of your favorite cookie recipe? So as you can see, I’ve divided my preferred recipe in half so that I can double the butter to compare and contrast. First up, the signature Babish cookie dough. In a half recipe, we’ve got four ounces or one stick of refrigerator-cold unsalted butter. 2 1/4 ounces of sugar and 4.75 ounces of brown sugar get beaten together on high speed in a stand mixer for anywhere from two to five minutes. We want the sugar and butter mixture to turn light and fluffy, indicating that we have a strong emulsion, which is going to be especially important when we introduce even more butter into the situation. So once that butter is looking fluffy, we’re gonna add our single egg, beat that together until light and fluffy but sorta creamy, scrape down the sides of the bowl, and then in a separate bowl, we’re combining our dry ingredients: 5.75 ounces of all-purpose flour, two teaspoons kosher salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda. Go ahead and mix this together on medium-low speed until no dry patches remain. Six ounces of the chocolate of your choice, I like to do a little bit of chips, a little bit of chopped. Mix until evenly distributed, and there you have it: our standard cookie dough recipe, as reliable as it is delicious. But let’s see what happens when we add a positively stupendous amount of butter, eight ounces or more than 1/3 of the cookie dough’s mass by weight. Exact same procedure here, maybe beating the butter and sugar together a little bit more to make sure that they stay emulsified, and what results is a light, creamy cookie dough with the consistency of whipped butter. So which one will bake up best? Make sure the heat and time are objective. I’m gonna bake up six of each on the same sheet, pretend that I’m a graffiti artist with my nonstick spray, and use it to anchor your parchment paper to prevent wrinkling or curling. I’m gonna distribute the dough using this tiny little two-ounce scoop, and even though these cookie doughs definitely look different, I don’t wanna mix them up, so I’m gonna label the normal butter and the double butter right on the sheet so there’s no confusion. I decided to abbreviate the word butter for the sake of efficiency. Now I’m gonna try to give these cookies a fighting chance by refrigerating them before baking. But even after an hour in the fridge and 12 to 15 minutes in a 375 degree Fahrenheit oven, there was no rescuing the double butts from their fate. Too much fat and particularly too much moisture led to some thin, floppy cookies. Certainly not bad, but certainly not good, either. As you can see, the standard cookies baked up a little bit pale because I didn’t wanna burn the double-butter ones, but even that didn’t stop them from being pretty awesome. As it turned out, baking time and temperature was the way to go. These ones baked at 325 for a few extra minutes, I think melted more slowly and therefore set more quickly. And if you don’t think time and temperature matter, think again! These four cookies are all the same recipe, but as you can see, the ones baked slower and lower turned out crispier and lacier, almost like a homemade Tate’s, which is just about every bit as good as it sounds. So if you’re gonna up your butter content, make sure that your dough is cold and try baking it a lower temperature than you might normally. And then I realized that one of my favorite cookie tricks could remove a lot of moisture from the cookie dough, increasing crispness and preventing floppy biscuits. That is to start with the normal double butter amount, one pound of which I’m very carefully measuring out here, which I’m going to bring over to the stovetop to brown. Butter in the States is about 18% water, and in the process of browning butter, this water evaporates, almost three ounces’ worth. So to brown it, we’re just cooking it over medium heat until the milk solids separate and start to turn, well, brown, pouring it into a heat-proof receptacle, and refrigerating it until solid. Once you retrieve it, whatever shape it’s in, you wanna cut it down in some more manageable pieces, toss it in your stand mixer, and then it’s business as usual. But I wanted to channel my inner Bobby Hill, so I didn’t just add chocolate chips. I added butterscotch chips, chopped almond toffee chocolate, pretzels, peanut butter breakfast cereal, and caramel popcorn. Then I’m scooping these guys out onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, wrapping them in plastic wrap, and fridging them for three nights. This is not only gonna further desiccate the cookie dough, it’s going to age it and develop its flavor. So this time I’m baking these at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 12 minutes until soft in the middle but set and lightly browned around the edges. This resulted in a buttery, crunchy, chewy, salty-sweet phantasmagoria of flavors, and this has become my new cookie philosophy. Grab anything remotely appropriate to put in a cookie and put it in there, then get some other stuff and also put that in there. That is how you beat your girlfriend in an Arrow Girls cookie bake-off scenario. Thanks again to Cash App for sponsoring today’s episode. Don’t forget to download Cash App today and use code BABISH22 to get $15 for free, and $10 will be donated to No Kid Hungry. (upbeat music)