C is for Dale's Cookie, and that's Oh-Holy-God Good Enough for Me

Say what you will about this season of Top Chef (and as you all know I find pages and pages to say about this season week in and week out, much of it profane), but it has provoked an unprecedented number of cravings in me.

The Rao's episode has had me craving cacciatore for two weeks now (it's also made me picky about risotto in a way I hadn't previously been -- Tonic, your mushroom rice is tasty but it doesn't spread and therefore it ain't risotto). I have stopped just shy of actually grabbing people on the street and begging them to come to my apartment so I can make them a cacciatore, but only because I'm afraid that charges would be filed as a result.

Mere days after the Jimmy Fallon episode, a friend put pictures up on Facebook of her homemade pot pies. The only thing that kept me from rushing to her place to eat them was the knowledge that the pot pies would've been cold by the time I got to Phoenix.

And then there's last week's episode. I watched last week's episode, and my immediate response was...

Me want Dale's Cookie.

I tried to talk myself out of it. "You are an adult," I said. "You can't go around making cookies out of potato chips and pretzels just because some guy on a TV show did. Besides, cookies -- especially potato pretzel chocolate salted caramel cookies -- are a sometimes food."

But the voice in my head would not shut up. ME. WANT. DALE's. COOKIE.

So I looked online for the recipe, and found two versions -- one on Dale's blog, the other on bravotv.com. But neither of them are terribly specific -- Dale's doesn't give any quantities whatsoever, while Bravo's gives vague ones -- "two bags" each of pretzels and potato chips? What size bags, people? Two Utz Pounder bags? Two vending machine sized bags?

Help a monster out, Bravo.

Ultimately, I decided to go with Dale's recipe, since. .. it is Dale's recipe, after all. So from here on out, his instructions will be in Top Chef orange; my comments in plain text.

Cookie Monster's remarks, naturally, will continue to be in blue.

In a food processor take plain store bought potato chips, salted plain pretzels and grind them down.

I used plain Utz potato chips and Snyder's of Hannover Pretzel Sticks. The Utz were a natural choice because of their deliciousness and their cheapness. The pretzel sticks were on sale, and I thought they might break down more easily than another shape would.
I kept alternating handfuls of pretzels and handfuls of chips and blitzing them in my food processor until I had a fairly full processor bowl -- bear in mind, though, that I have a blender/food processor combo, so the work bowl is a little smaller than normal.

Anyway, I ultimately ended up using about a half to three quarters of a bag of the chips, and a half bag of the pretzel sticks (this calculation doesn't account for the ones that bypassed the processor and found their way into my belly).

Melt butter, and in a mixing bowl and pretzels, chips, sugar , a small amount of all purpose flour, salt,This is maybe my favorite part of the entire process (except for eating of cookies, of course) -- the second the melted butter hits the dry ingredients, the unmistakeable butter-sugar-salt-pretzel smell of Auntie Anne's fills your kitchen. "Mmmm," I thought. "This is what living in a mall must smell like."

This is also where I almost grabbed the rice flour instead of the all-purpose, and it occurred to me that it would be really, REALLY easy to make this a gluten free recipe if you used Glutino pretzels, a safe brand of chip, and rice flour. You're welcome, celiac types.

Anyway, to proportion -- I'd say that I used in the neighborhood of 1/8 cup of flour and maybe a bit more sugar, plus a few tablespoons of salt and about a stick and a half of butter.

pack it into a baking pan and bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

The bravotv.com recipe specifies a sheet pan, but since I'd kind of figured out by that point that I was working with a smaller batch than they'd made, I went with a 9x9 square pan. This is the pre-baking picture; post baking looks a bit darker but much the same.

Make a Caramel with sugar, butter, cream, and salt

Totally cheated on this one. The voice in my head was going ME WANT COOKIE ME WANT COOKIE so insistently and my caramel making experience is so limited and the results so mixed that I used an 11.5 ounce bag of baker's caramel nibs, melted down with cream and a bit of extra sugar, then salted it until I had the taste and texture I wanted.

then pour over chopped chocolate to make a salted Carmel ganache.


That's a standard sized bag of dark chocolate morsels melted into the caramel. It's going to take awhile for the mixture to melt down, then a bit longer for it to get nice and shiny and have a good liquid texture. Fortunately, during that time your base will have finished baking and can take awhile to hang out and cool to room temperature.

When the pretzel potato chip cools pour over the Carmel ganache and let it set


Turn the pan and let the ganache ooze all over the crust so everything gets covered, and do a little spready-spready with the spatula to make sure it's (fairly) evenly distributed.

I popped mine into the fridge to set to speed up the process a bit, because ME WANT COOKIE. ME WANT COOKIE NOW NOW NOW! COOKIE COOKIE COOKIE! And I figured it would be better to hurry that along while I completed the last step.

then pop in a little B.I.G and holler @ your boy.

What? It was in the directions. I can only assume that if you DON'T listen to B.I.G. while your cookies are setting, they will come out tasting like shit.

Dale's directions end there. The bravotv.com directions specify that once the cookies are set, you should cut them into rounds with a ring mold.

I decided to make them a bar shape, mostly because I'd rather have 25 neat little cookie bites than 9 larger rounds and a bunch of corner scraps and nonsense.

They are. So. Fucking. Good. They are the absolute perfect blend of sweet and salty; of light tasty crust and rich, dense, chocolateycaramellysalty ganache goodness.

I love them so much, I want to take them behind the middle school and get them pregnant.

Make these cookies. Make them now. You will not regret it, ever.

Sing us out, Cookie Monster.